Do viral clips with a pop-up warning advising people "under 18 years old" against watching videos of the "overcrowded Oktoberfest" show dramatic events in Munich, Germany? No, that's not true: It's engagement bait added to routine video of the annual beer and folk culture festival. Such pop-up banners attempt to make social media users hit "like" or "follow" buttons as people try to skip the banner, thereby driving up the "engagement" statistics and potential for monetization of the video.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here and here) published on TikTok on September 30, 2025. Its top banner read:
Overcrowded
Oktoberfest 2025
🍺🍺🍺
At the 00:03 mark, another -- pop-up -- white banner covered a significant portion of the frame. It read:
Under 18 years old,
please do not watch!
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at tiktok.com/@gfcugp)
The banner implied that the content of the video may be either too violent or too explicit for people under the age of 18. In the audio from the clip, people were heard screaming.
Yet, contrary to the soundtrack, people in the footage -- still visible around the pop-up banner -- did not change their behavior, as viewers started to hear screams. That suggested that the audio could have been added to the footage.
In 2025, Oktoberfest (archived here) takes place in Munich, Germany, between September 20 and October 5. On September 30, 2025, DW (archived here) reported that "the festival entrances were briefly closed over the weekend due to overcrowding." On October 1, 2025, as reported by the New York Times (archived here), the authorities temporarily closed the Oktoberfest area "because of a bomb threat that they said was linked to an explosion in a residential area of the city". Nevertheless, contrary to the claim suggesting that something terrible happened there, the beer festival fully reopened hours after a security inspection, the AP (archived here) wrote.
Lead Stories found no evidence that, as of this writing, a mass casualty incident, stampede, or any other dramatic development occurred during the Oktoberfest celebrations in Munich.
Clips mentioning Oktoberfest and displaying the same white banner were posted on TikTok from multiple accounts (archived here), and often, the same account posted one video several times (archived here):
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of tiktok.com)
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of posts at tiktok.com/@gfcugp)
The presence of the white pop-up banner in multiple videos appeared to drive engagement, tricking people into accidentally pressing "like" or "follow" buttons that were close to the X mark in a warning's corner. Yet, despite the appearance, the X button would not close the window: The banner was part of the video -- not a separate element appearing over the footage that could have been skipped to view the full video.
