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A rose rests on the new Titanic Memorial Plaque during the service at Belfast City Hall, Northern Ireland, on Sunday, a 100 years after the Titanic sank. Australian mining tycoon Palmer says massive Titanic II vessel to have original nine decks and a safety deck Image Credit: AP

Dubai: Titanic is now showing in 3D in cinemas everywhere — and for teenagers in the US, that's about as real as it gets.

A series of tweets doing the rounds on the internet show that a hundred years after it sank, many young people around the world don't even know the Titanic existed outside movie screens.

Once the largest ship ever built, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912 and sank into the depths of the Atlantic, taking with it the lives of over 1,500 people.

‘Just a film'

Monday, the world marked the 100th anniversary of that tragic night.

A teenager with the Twitter handle iSophloveBieber tweeted: "Didn't know the Titanic actually happened. :O I thought it was just a film!"

Another user called lizamagang wrote: "Nobody told me Titanic was real…? How am I just finding this out?!"

Realisation also dawned belatedly on Mr. Dragon Slayer, who tweeted: "The Titanic was real… I'm never going on a cruise".

The tweeters have received attention — and a lot of flak — for their blatant display of ignorance.

'Embarrassed for you'

Twitter user Angie. wrote back: "I'm embarrassed FOR you."

Others have started calling the group ‘twitter idiots', while some have responded to them with the hashtag "My Sigh Will Go On" — in relation to the movie's soundtrack by singer Celine Dion.

But young people in the UAE are more aware about the event than their fellow teenagers, according to Hanoof Saeed, a 15-year-old based in Dubai.

She said: "I don't think anyone I know believes the Titanic wasn't real. We've all heard about it from the film and the song My Heart Will Go On that became so famous."

‘I read about it'

Zibah Fairuz Barri, a grade eight student based in Dubai, said she would have known about the Titanic even if the film wasn't released.

"I first read about it in my history book," she said.

Amber Zahra Ali, a Gulf News reader, didn't see why people were making such a fuss about the issue.

In her comment on the Gulf News Facebook page, she wrote: "It's not a history-changing event that we have to make sure that our children know about."

But Aju John Philip, another Facebook commenter, said: "Definitely the younger generation should know about it as there is a lot to learn from it."