Before you get concerned, let’s lead with the facts: The Golden Gate Bridge is fine. It hasn’t disappeared. It’s not going anywhere. Nothing is “going on with it,” despite what you may have heard on social media.
“The pilot let us have one last glimpse at the Golden Gate Bridge!!” a woman wrote under a TikTok video she posted Monday of the view out her airplane window as she flew away from San Francisco.
Stamped over the view of the city, coast, and bay, she added, “POV: the pilot just told the whole plane to look out the window IMMEDIATELY.” The 10-second clip is set to the dramatic sounds of the Labrinth song “Forever.”
By Thursday, the post had been viewed more than 5.3 million times — not unexpected for a celebration of a beloved landmark. But things quickly got confused in the comments, demonstrating a classic spread of misinformation on the internet.
“one last glimpse at the golden gate bridge? is something happening to it?” read a comment with 13,000 likes.
@chasingtori The pilot let us have one last glimpse at the Golden Gate Bridge!! 🌁🌉#sanfrancisco #traveltok #goldengatebride #planeviews #airplane #aeroplane #plane
♬ Forever – Labrinth
Of course, the pilot was merely pointing out that the Golden Gate Bridge would shortly be out of sight for passengers on the eastbound flight. But you knew that. Commenters on TikTok did not.
“Wait guys didn’t this bridge like calapse and there were cars in it and it was all over the news I think it was cus a big boat went under it are was that a different bridge,” said another top comment posted Wednesday.
Quickly, the misinformation spread beyond the post’s comment section. A man posted to TikTok a video asking if something was “happening” with the Golden Gate Bridge, citing the social platform, an unnamed movie with John Cena, and Gematria, a Hebrew numerology system that has been utilized in an app known to fuel right-wing conspiracy theories.
@wick369_ “Golden Gate Bridge”
♬ San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair) – Scott McKenzie
@kaytipie What’s gonna go down next? #californiawildfire #wildfires #goldengatebridge #californiacheck #2025prediction
♬ original sound – Kayti
The algorithm pushed these videos to other people’s feeds, and the momentum built. Others posted speculation about what on earth could be going on with the bridge, saying how much they would miss it when it was gone.
TikTok’s algorithm comprises a litany of interactions: likes, comments, engagement time, follows, interests, and location. It pushed the videos to the feeds of people in San Francisco and those who routinely like posts about the city. It also seemed to reach the conspiracy curious. According to a 2018 study published by Science, lies spread faster on the internet than the truth. Watchdogs have pressured social media platforms to mitigate such misinformation, but the appetite for fighting it directly has waned. The starkest example of that trend came this week, when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the decision to end fact-checking on Instagram, Facebook, and other Meta platforms.
On Wednesday, the woman who posted the first video made another in an attempt at putting a stop to the speculation.
“I was just saying that the plane was flying away from the Golden Gate Bridge so it was the last time we were going to see it,” she said. Flabbergasted by the way her comments had been taken out of context, she tried to mitigate the misinformation on her own.
That video has received only 64,000 views.
According to the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy’s live camera at Crissy Field, the Golden Gate Bridge was still standing Thursday.