A video with hundreds of thousands of views on Instagram is garnering a mixed reaction from the online community. Harrison Wiedman posted a video earlier this month that shows him telling the story of his shark attack, starting with “I got attacked by a shark today.” He adds footage of the shark attack into the video after he tells his story. Wiedman added a trigger warning at the top of his post caption.
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Wiedman begins the video by explaining that he’s leading a dive expedition in Indonesia, and even though he’s been in water with sharks before, he didn’t expect to see a shark that day. When he saw it, he felt excited, but then it attacked him. Wiedman explains that he’s ok. At this point, viewers are wondering: What’s going on here?
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In fact, the first clue that something’s not as it seems is the caption. After Wiedman’s trigger warning, he writes: “Such beautiful creatures that are just naturally curious. This was a cool experience.” Not many shark-attack survivors would call the experience “cool.”
Watch Wiedman’s “I got attacked by a shark” video and then keep reading below:
Does This Count as a Shark Attack?
Turns out, the shark attack was pretty tame. The footage seemed a bit anticlimactic after the build up, but I have no doubt that the experience would have been scary in real life. The online community didn’t hold back in the comments section.
“How can you call this being attacked by a shark? Literally just bumped into you. Putting a negative image on sharks for clicks, that’s all,” wrote one person.
“Please as a fellow diver, stop using the words ‘attack’ and ‘shark’ together as we want to stop the negative image people have of sharks. So how about ‘shark incident’ or ‘accident with shark’ or in your case ‘curiously approached by a shark to a point i felt not very comfortable anymore,'” wrote another.
Others had a sense of humor about it. For instance, one TikTok user wrote: “no idea how you survived such an aggressive boop attack.”
In all seriousness, we’re glad neither human nor shark was harmed.
Header stock image by Philip Thurston/Getty Images
