The Eiffel Tower is a 1,083-foot structure made of iron — and despite what you may have seen online, it’s not on fire.


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This should be obvious, not only because it’s made of iron (iron melts at 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit and is unlikely to straight up start on fire), but because you can literally watch a live stream of the structure if you’ve got nothing better to do with your time.


Oh yeah, there’s also the fact that if the Eiffel Tower was truly on fire, you wouldn’t be hearing about it for the first time on TikTok. Despite this, an image began floating around last week showing the Eiffel Tower fully ablaze.



Even though the image has all the uncomfortable smoothness characteristic of A.I. generation, internet users were fooled, with this clip and others like it accumulating millions of views. In fact, TikTok is still full of fake videos and images of the Eiffel Tower burning, many of them with hundreds of thousands of views. Healthy society we’re living in, boys!





Just for fun, I decided to see if any other famous buildings were “on fire.” As it turns out, the whole damn world is about to go down in a blaze. For example, if you ever wanted to see the Burj Khalifa, too bad — according to TikTok, it’s going down in a ball of ashes.



Thankfully, this TikToker had the decency to mark their video as A.I.-generated. But just to be clear, if you see something on TikTok, you should probably Google it to make sure it actually happened before telling your friends that Paris is literally burning.