TikTok: the controversial dopamine addiction app known for silly dances, absurdist humor, and five-star world-class education. You can learn languages, recipes, home improvement, crafting skills. .
. . .
. medical advice? History?
Yeah, it shouldn't come as a surprise that an app driven by punchy, short-form video content is a prime environment to foster, uh, less than ideal academic integrity. Usually, you'll just get some lightly misinformed videos, or confused people with, like, maybe 200 views, but in some of the worst cases, you end up with accounts touting videos with millions of views that have unsourced, extremely questionable history; or, just as bad, try to explain extremely complex historical concepts in one minute, that would actually take a mega long video essay or even a book to cover. This is kind of the beef that I personally have with some queer history education on TikTok and Twitter.
I think some folks manage to do it well, but a lot of the time it's not a topic that can be simplified or explained in one to three minutes or a few tweets without losing some really valuable context. And even with the good accounts, there usually aren't sources cited. But then there's some "history education" accounts out there that are so bad, it's actually harmful to a greater perception of the past.
From the claim that people pooped on the floor of Versailles, to the conspiracy that ancient Rome wasn't real, let's talk about TikTok and its cesspool of historical misinformation. Unfortunately, come learn with me. But before we get into the tickety-tockety torture, let's hear a quick word from today's sponsor: Harry's.
Shaving can be a huge hassle, especially if you use products that leave your skin irritated, or continually run out of new blades when you need them the most. I've been a long, long time user of Harry's, though; so I personally haven't had those issues in a really long time, and it's made the whole process just that much more simple. Harry's premium blades are manufactured in their own factory in Germany, and give a close, comfortable, and Incredibly smooth shave.
Their new design includes these gorgeous two-tone handles, and I got this super fun ember orange one. And the handle has these little grooves in it for a better grip, so your hand isn't slipping and sliding all over the place - the last thing you want while you're shaving. And the weight and curvature of the handle just makes it feel really nice and easy to maneuver.
Also, 50% of the plastic in the handle is recycled, so you're also doing some good in keeping disposable plastic razors out of landfills. The razor heads themselves are flexible, high quality, and have a precision blade on top. Also, something that's important to me is that Harry's has no pink tax.
Everyone has the same fair and affordable price for razors, regardless of your gender. And most importantly, if you've got sensitive skin, using a well-made shaving gel is so important, and Harry's gel is formulated with soothing ingredients like hyaluronic acid and aloe to prevent painful razor bumps and irritation. To make things easy, you can order their five-piece starter set, which comes complete with a 5-blade, German-engineered razor cartridge, a weighted textured handle, shave cream with aloe, and the travel blade cover.
And when you're ready for more razor heads, you can make things super simple by having razor refills delivered right to your door. Get your starter set from Harry's for just $5 by clicking the link in description below to step up your shaving routine. That's a $13 value for just five bucks.
Thank you so much to Harry's for sponsoring this video, and now, let's get back to learning about some of TikTok's most violent history offenders. [suspensful jazzy percussion] Natalie Nourigat observed in her Guardian column, "The use of propaganda is ancient, but never before has there been the technology to so effectively disseminate it. " And that's kind of the crux of the issue we'll be exploring today, but as always, we have to know how we got here to truly understand the 'here' that we're dealing with.
It shouldn't be surprising at all to hear that propaganda and misinformation aren't remotely new problems, and are, in fact, very ancient ones. From the age of the Romans, when Emperor Octavian used coins to disseminate catchy slogans painting Antony as a drunk womanizer; to the 6th Century AD, when Procopius of Caesaria used a treatise called Secret History to spread lies about Emperor Justinian and his wife, and gain favor under the new emperor. Historical misinformation is, after all, inherently political.
Joanna M Burkhardt writes in 'Combating Fake News in the Digital Age,' "Knowledge is power. Those controlling knowledge, information, and the means to disseminate information became group leaders, with privileges that others in the group did not have. In many early state societies, remnants of the perks of leadership remain - pyramids, castles, lavish household goods, and more.
" But naturally, misinformation gets a massive boost by the inventions of new and radical innovations to media and information delivery. When the Gutenberg printing press was invented in 1493, it sparked not only the beginning of mass media, but a sharp rise in literacy. Literacy doesn't always come coupled with media literacy, however; as we well know today.
Many readers were still, and still are, vulnerable to lies and being too trusting of authors that they deemed to be trustworthy, for one reason or another. As I discussed in my video on Julie d'Aubigny, many writers and memoirists in the 17th to 18th centuries had absolutely no reason to not lie in their works. After all, who was going to fact check them to the masses?
And frankly, embellishing stories with made-up details certainly made them sell better. That's not to say that no one recognized that this was a serious issue, though. In 1710, Jonathan Swift published an essay titled, 'The Art of Political Lying,' in which he ominously proclaimed, "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.
" Over time, these lies became part of historical canon - repeated over and over and over; and are often only recently being double-checked, or even questioned by historians. And these issues, of course, eventually led to the first large-scale news hoax in 1835: the Great Moon Hoax, in which The New York Sun newspaper published six articles claiming that life had been discovered on the moon. These articles included huge illustrations showing strange bat-like aliens, unicorns, and more.
And, obviously, a lot of people read this and were like, 'Oh, my god! The newspaper is printing it, so it must be true! " Tragically, there are no bat people or blue unicorns on the moon.
But this wouldn't be the last time people in the 1800s would shamelessly publish fiction under the guise of truth. In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an article claiming that someone had crossed the Atlantic in three days in a hot air balloon, and then proceeded to write at least six more fake news stories in his lifetime, each time causing havoc for reporters and the readers who believed the stories. Which would be really funny, if I didn't know where shit like this led to, so.
No. Bad Edgar. And then Washington Irving, the author famous for writing stories like 'Sleepy Hollow' and 'Rip Van Winkle,' also fancied himself a historian.
The problem is, many of his history books were filled with romantic fiction played off as facts. The most famous case that he created came from his book on the life of Christopher Columbus, in which he claimed that Europeans believe that the Earth was flat until Columbus proved that it was actually round. As I talked about in my video on medieval myths, the Europeans of the Middle Ages actually didn't believe the Earth was flat.
They had the science and mathematics to know that it was round, and depicted it as such in many illustrations. But the Flat Earth myth fell in easily with the Victorians idea that the Middle Ages was the Dark Ages, and all medieval people were horrible and stupid. So this lie got repeated and reinforced throughout the 19th century, until it ended up becoming a commonly held and accepted belief about medieval times.
The Victorians were eager to paint that era as the Dark Ages because it followed the Enlightenment idea of Progressivism: that progress is linear, and every era is inherently better than the last, in every possible way. And as a result, the Victorians believed that they were a superior society - just, uh, don't look at all the colonization and slavery and poverty happening over there. But you can see how that would give writers and historians an incentive to lie about the past, right?
The printing press wasn't the end of media evolution. With each new invention: the radio, the film camera, television, and now the internet, the ease with which fake history can be consumed and disseminated has only grown more and more powerful. In the age of the Internet, it's now easier than ever to spread lies.
Before, at least, you needed some sort of credentials. You had to be a writer, or someone of note, or had some kind of access to the rare and coveted tools to access the masses. Now, for better or for worse, these tools are in the hands of every single person with access to the internet.
Anyone can, in a matter of minutes, create an account on Twitter, or TikTok, or YouTube, and post a video or tweet, claiming some kind of fact or history, with no sources cited; maliciously or knowingly, or not. And potentially hundreds, or thousands, or millions of people will see and possibly believe it. This, the conundrum we find ourselves in today, is an issue more serious than we realize.
Few people understand how serious it is than, well, people like me and many other historical educators online. Our job is very serious, because I understand how easy it is to fall for lies online. Actually, that was one of the reasons I made my channel in the first place.
I got really, really sick of going on Twitter every day, and seeing people make huge threads about history; filled with lies or misinformation, with no sources or shoddy sources; but worded so confidently that people believed them. From issues as benign as the old claim that corsets were woman-hating murderous death cages, to issues as serious as lies about the Holocaust. Every day it was something, and every time I clicked on the thread, I would see dozens, if not hundreds of people, uncritically taking it as truth.
And I got really, really upset and scared. You don't know that person. If you, like me, ask them for their sources, a lot of the time you'd get a response with some variation of "just trust me bro.
" Or you'd get ignored, or they'd lash out at you. [Buster Baxter: "You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
"] That's why all my videos have my comprehensive sources listed, and I spend days, and days, and -days- crawling through my sources. trying my best to vet them. And even then, sometimes I slip up.
And if that happens despite the amount of research I do, imagine how easy it is for someone who does basically no research at all to shit out a video, spouting some completely buck wild story about history, and have it reach a city's worth of people. And few places online harbor this as easily as the internet's misinformation darling, TikTok [music: contemplative piano solo] I don't know what to blame for how popular these videos get. I can't just say it's because TikTok's user base is mostly kids, because a lot of people I see falling for these videos are adults, and almost all the people making these videos are adults.
So is it because people on TikTok are inherently more gullible? I don't know. Maybe?
I hate to say that because I, too, have literally fallen for fake stuff on there before. I am not immune to propaganda. I think the difference has a lot to do with the fact that on TikTok, you're not typically seeing like, professionals and fancy productions.
You're seeing regular people in their homes excitedly sharing something they just learned with you. And I can definitely see the appeal of that. That's what my own videos are too, in a way.
But these TikTok videos make it easier to trust the people making them because it kind of tricks your brain into seeing this info as being given to you by a friend in an intimate conversation. These folks seem cool and personable, and you can see their face, and you want to trust them. And like, most people aren't going to sit down and read a brick of a book every day like I do.
And there's also the complicated factor of like, people wanting to trust "regular people" rather than academic, inaccessible, "fancy pants guys" because a lot of folks online really easily fall for the idea that the "higher-ups" are trying to hide some great secret from you. And that's where you get stuff like the Helen Keller conspiracy. The Helen Keller conspiracy started sometime around May 2020, when a user on TikTok started using #HelenKellerWasntReal which then drifted over to Twitter, when Daniel Kunka tweeted that his younger relatives had insisted to him that "Helen Keller was a fraud who didn't exist.
" Almost every video on TikTok advancing this conspiracy usually gets a few people in the comments challenging it, which usually get the, 'okay go away boomer' reply. Many commenters also recount fighting with their teachers about it which enforces the idea of their "beliefs being suppressed. " The root of this conspiracy is centered on the ableist belief that, if Helen Keller really was deaf and blind, she couldn't have done all that.
Haben Girma, a deaf-blind human rights lawyer, writes: "The videos may have started as jokes, but that doesn't change the fact that they are harming disabled people. . .
Nearly every disabled person has been told, at one time or another, 'You're faking it. '" Keller was accused of being a fake and a liar even in her own lifetime, and even frequently by people who had previously sided with and protected her. Any disabled person knows just how easy it is for folks to give up on, or turn on us when it becomes convenient.
For example, she had largely leftist and progressive political beliefs and intended to be involved in activism, but was often disregarded because people believed her limited development, whatever the f*** that means, meant that she was too easily influenced by outside voices. At every turn in life and in death, Keller was denied the human right to full agency and dignity. They conspiracy we deal with now comes, in part, from the adamant teaching of Keller as, like, quite nearly inspiration porn, as many disabled folks who rise above their circumstances are.
Helen Keller, against her will, was transformed into an idealized hero figure for youth, representing a community of people who universally experience having their struggles questioned. It's no wonder then that Keller would be the one to be centered in this conspiracy; accusations of fakeness and lies lobbied at her as a way for young students to express their frustrations. The Helen Keller conspiracy isn't necessarily about Helen herself.
It's a symptom of young people's poor education and frustrations with not being taken seriously by the adults in their lives. But sometimes historical misinformation perpetuated by "kids these days" isn't really that deep. Sometimes, it's just a really bad case of a game of Telephone.
The 'Harriet Tubman punching babies' thing started with, from what I can find, this tweet from Twitter user queenglitter4 that says, "Hearing that Harriet Tubman used to knock out crying babies because it could get them caught is the wildest thing I've ever heard cry laughing emoji cry laughing emoji cry laughing emoji cry la-" And then if you scroll down to a reply that asked where the hell they read that, they reply, "it popped up on my Facebook feed. " Well, at least they're honest. This tweet then spread to TikTok, where it became the subject, obviously, of many jokes.
. . ["'Hearing that Harriet Tubman used to knock out crying babies because it could possibly get them caught is the wildest thing I've ever heard' Oh my goodness!
"] [Voiceover, screaming: "Don't just stand there! "] . .
. that only spiraled and spiraled, until it landed in well-intentioned TikTok comments on completely unrelated videos. Which is where I first saw it, and I was like, you're joking, right?
Like, this is a joke? Unfortunately, it doesn't take much sleuthing to find out that people are not joking. So let me break down where this confusion came from.
Harriet Tubman did not punch or otherwise assault babies in order to keep them quiet while traveling the Underground Railroad. She would feed them laudnum, AKA opium, in order to, you could say, "knock them out" or put them to sleep for the journey. As I explained in my Victorian medicine videos, giving babies opium as a sedative or calming medicine in this time period was extremely common.
So to Harriet Tubman, it'd be a no-brainer to use this method. ["What's wild is she would often knock them out by foraging for herbs she knew could induce sleep in infants. She'd dose them with different plans she learned about from her father growing up!
She also used plant medicine to heal wounds! Talented botanist and herbalist, y'all! "] So, no, she wasn't knocking out babies like a WWE Smackdown.
She was knocking them out with potent drugs. Not the same thing. Cases like this, I think, show how easy it is for miscommunication or a confused reading on a fact can spiral into a frenzy, unquestioningly accepted by anyone who hears it, because we're kind of already primed to accept that stuff was crazy in ye olden days.
Which is why, for generations now we have fallen victim to the pervasive myth now taking over TikTok, that the French nobility pissed and sh- [quack sound] in the hallways of Versailles. ["Versailles was finished in the mid 1600s and they did not have bathrooms in that b****, OK? "] This is a massively pervasive myth, but where did it even come from?
["They had a piss wall, which is where all the men would go outside and piss on. "] Apparently, Turneau de la Morandiere called Versailles, "the receptacle of all humanity's horrors - the passageways, corridors, and courtyards are filled with urine and fecal matter. " Another quote from the same source claimed, "The unpleasant odors in the park, gardens, and even the chateau make one's gorge rise.
The communicating passages, courtyards, buildings in the wings, corridors, are all full of urine and feces. " ["It wasn't until the 19th century that they were like, maybe we should get some bathrooms up in here. "] First of all, there's one vital missing detail.
These primary sources never said it was human pee-pee poo-poo. A lot of the nobility had yappy little dogs and kind of didn't give a crap, ha ha, where the pets went to the bathroom. Here's another fact: despite claims to the contrary, Versailles did actually have latrines.
They just weren't exactly what we would think of as a bathroom today. They were usually a room with a wooden seat that connected to a waste pipe to a cesspit. In certain eras it was a chaise room, that had curtains or screens for people to do their business behind using a chamber pot.
Still incredibly stinky, yes, but not the same thing as people popping a squat on the palace floor like animals. ["Or they would just, like, go behind a door and piss on the floor. "] The aristocratic residents, of course, had their own close stools, which was kind of like a chair toilet, basically with a chamber pot in it.
But everyone else had to use the latrine. This isn't helped by the fact that Versailles was apparently built on a smelly marsh, so in general, the entire place just kind of smelled bad by nature of being in a marsh. There were some rare recorded incidents of human people; usually men, and usually the servants; relieving themselves on the walls of the palace, however.
But! These were always an unusual or offensive enough occurrence that people were very loudly complaining about it. There was at least one incident where Marie Antoinette was apparently hit with flying sh-[quack sound] when a servant emptied a chamber pot out of the window, but this was severely frowned upon, and a public notice was put up warning against it.
But by the early to mid 1700s, several residents of Versailles actually had flushing toilets, and by 1789, Versailles had nine flushing toilets. And even that aside, people had no reason to go to the bathroom on the floor when f****** chamber pots and bourdalous existed. Ladies could easily just stick that bad boy under their skirts and go, since they had no underwear to pull down.
And for men, it was even easier. Hi, editing me here. So, another really big factor of the, like, bathrooms at Versailles conversation that I neglected to include in the actual video, is the fact that the French Revolution happened.
And as I've just discussed in previous videos, like the one on Julie d'Aubigny, the French Revolution was a time where a lot of revolutionary writers were, for better for worse, making up a lot of slander and lies about the court of Versailles, and just the monarchy in general. They were very righteously angry, of course, but that leaves us today with a lot of, um, problems to deal with because now we have to sort fact from fiction with all this revolutionary propaganda that came out during the revolution. But through a lot of documentation that we have on Versailles, we do know that the nobles at Versailles did bathe, and a lot of them bathe daily, like Marie Antoinette, for example.
Um, even King Louis XIV, where a lot of rumors say that he never bathed. He did bathe. He had a giant very, uh, luxurious bath, which he didn't like using that one as much as the more modest tub that was in his bedroom.
And there were over a hundred bathrooms at Versailles which the nobility used. Each, you know, room that the nobles had, had a bathroom. And then other records say that King Louis XIV listed a total of 264 stools at Versailles, AKA close stools.
Obviously, Versailles was open to the public, and for obvious reasons, the commoners were not allowed to use these fancier bathrooms. And they would have had to use the curtained-off, uh, latrines. That is not to say that nobody ever took a dump behind the stairways or on the floor This isn't to say that the French commoners were, like, inherently grosser than the nobles.
However, this was not that common because the people who lived at Versailles were really, really complaining about it. And whatever refuse was on the floor was getting cleaned up at least semi-regularly. So it's like, long story short, it's a way more complicated situation than we have been led to believe.
But even this whole thing about King Louis XIV is so hard to parse out, like, what's true from what is fiction. You can go from one source, which is a highly reliable source, apparently, by like, you know, well-known scholars who say that King Louis XIV did bathe regularly. And then you go to a different source, which might be from like Cambridge or something, that says something like, "preferred with such dire advice, it is no surprise to learn that Louis XIV had just two baths in his life, both medically supervised, and both apparently made him terribly ill.
Do you see why this is such a pervasive problem? Because, like, it just - nobody agrees, like, at all. I f****** hate having to, I guess, defend the cleanliness of these rich French people, because I don't even f****** like them.
Like, I've already had some people on TikTok, for instance, argue with me like, what's the point of defending how clean they were, they sucked. Yeah, I know they suck. But I would prefer to hate them for the true, the true bad stuff than what is fake.
You know what I mean? Every time I read this whole thing about King Louis XIV having just two baths, they never cite any sources. So which one am I gonna believe then?
But, of course, if someone out there watching this is, like, an expert. A doctorate of, you know, 18th-century French things and you have some firsthand account that I just haven't come across? Of course, please let me know, because as is the point of this video, I'm always open to correcting myself if I'm wrong.
Maybe I am wrong. It's not like I lived back then. As far as you know.
And here's another very good point, which a few friends brought up to me when I was talking about this problem: if the nobility of Versailles really was pee-peeing and poo-pooing all over the floor of their fancy expensive palace, why the hell would the English not be clowning them to death? Seriously. If this was true, the English would be taking the piss - ha, ha - out of the French like crazy.
They would never live it down. But no, nary a whisper about it. And that's the most damning proof that there is that this myth is a myth.
This myth, though, is completely taking over the masses on TikTok, [exasperated sigh] due to some viral videos promoting it as a fact. One of which was posted by a user named Nicole Mackie. .
. ["They were literally living in piss and sh-"[quack sound]] . .
. who had another viral unsourced video, offering us yet another unusual historical myth: that people of history free bled on their periods. ["During this time period?
Nothing. They just were free bleeding. Free-bleeding into their, like, bacteria bu-"[quack sound]] Now, I really really don't want any of you going in and flooding her comments with hate or anything.
I'm sure she's not doing this out of ill-intent. However, when your videos are getting millions of views, you can't be irresponsibly spreading misinformation like this: ["'Maybe I'll put a rag up around there. ' They didn't have a rag.
They just didn't use one. "] I don't even know where to start with this. As I just said, no, the residents of Versailles were not literally living in piss and sh-[quack sound] and no, people weren't free bleeding on their periods, either.
I know this is an unbelievable notion, but people of history, much like people today, actually don't like feeling dirty and uncomfortable and they didn't like smelling bad. To paint them as such with completely unreliable "sources" from who knows where that you aren't even listing, is frankly, insulting and implies that people in the past were, like, sub-human freaks. And I don't think that's fair nor is it accurate.
Even if they are unforgivable rich people. The wonderful Abby Cox has made a fantastic video talking about the history of how people handled their periods with some really interesting experiments so I heavily implore you to go watch her video, which I'll link in the description below, which actually cites sources, by the way, as you should. Now, as it says in her bio and is clear from her videos, Nicole Mackie is a comedian, and not a historian and not an educator.
But one viral video is usually enough to get a TikTok user to go, 'huh, this type of content is popular. I should keep doing it forever. ' and after the Versailles thing, she's really been getting on the weird history thing Nicole, from one history lover to another, history is truly weird enough without relying on myths.
She really is funny, though, so I do hope she keeps up the history content. But you know, with some sources, and like, good sources. Because right now learning anything from these videos is like the equivalent of trying to learn real history from Drnk History.
Entertaining, of course. Accurate, absolutely not. But not all TikTok users have the conscience to even bother trying to tell history that is kind of true.
Some of them straight up lie. And honestly, buckle up for this one. Two years ago, a TikTok user named momlennial, or Donna, who had nearly a hundred thousand followers at the time, and claimed to have a degree in history and anthropology, made the absolutely buck wild claim that ancient Rome never existed.
In one TikTok, now deleted, she claimed that the Roman Empire was "a figment of the Spanish inquisition's imagination," and that there are no extant Roman or primary documents with Latin on them, and that Greece, not Rome, was the "power player" during the 4th to 2nd century BC. She went on to compare Rome's cultural and economic power to "Disney, or the circus," despite acknowledging that it was, indeed, an empire. Donna, is it real or not?
Then she went on to say that Hadrian's Wall was a road, and not a wall. . .
It's literally still there, so. . .
. and not even Roman. It is Roman.
Now, Donna, by this point, was no stranger to making, um, controversial history videos. She had previously made videos claiming that Alexander the Great was actually a woman, and that the name Jesus Christ translates to "cl*toris healer. " I'm not even going to bother refuting any of this, because it's literally not worth my time, but if you're interested, I promise if you Google 'momlennial Rome' you'll find a million videos from 2021 fighting this woman.
Donna has since, it seems, deleted her account and remade a new one called momlennial_returns, where she's still trying to harp on the Rome isn't real thing, now doubling down and saying that what she actually means is that there is no single Roman culture, which is not at all what she originally said, but okay. Anyway. But the truth here is, to be frank, Donna, and many creators like her, is most likely a grifter.
I think this was summed up incredibly well in this TikTok by Dr MJ Pardon, which I will show you in its entirety. [". .
. but the church would never do that to white people! " "Stop what you're doing, and just for a moment, reflect on your immediate reaction to that, especially in the context of a creator complaining that these are the kind of comments that she keeps getting on her videos.
This is a great way to start the video, because we're automatically on her side. You certainly don't want to be on the side of the people who are disagreeing with her in her comment section. Um, because first of all, sounds like those people are kind of racist.
Um, and second of all, it sounds like those people are just regurgitating this narrative that they've been spoon-fed by the church, and we certainly all want to be pushing back against oppressive institutions that are seeking to control the historical narrative. And this is not the only thing that's really smart about this video, and her videos in general. You may notice that her videos are all these sort of short, very incredulous, kind of punchy debunks.
Or like, how am I the only one who sees this, like, sheeple you need to wake up. Um, but she never really fully explains her overarching worldview or how these different little points all connect together, and that's on purpose, because that drives engagement. You then have to ask.
Also, if she started off her video with the statement, The Roman Empire, the entire Roman Empire, as well as the entire Latin language, was invented in the 15th century, by the Spanish Inquisition. And that's a historical narrative that has always just been protected by "the Church," I assume she means the Catholic Church, but she always just sort of says the Church. Anyway.
The point is, if she led with that, she would probably lose a lot of viewers pretty fast. But she doesn't lead with that. She sort of entices you in, leads you down the path, and then eventually, when it's time, she presents you with sort of the large conspiracy theory.
Tons of people have debunked this, um, but also we've been here before. Tons of people debunked when she was talking about Alexander the Great being a woman, or all of her claims about the historical Jesus, um, it sort of comes in waves. But when you hear people say or make comments on her videos of like, oh, I'm sort of having trouble following this.
Can you maybe just make one video explaining how sort of all your da-, ideas connect together? Or, this is sort of unclear. Um, that's a feature, not a bug.
Um, that's sort of part of her strategy for creating these videos. When I initially made a sort of "debunk" sort of video for her views, I wrote a comment saying, you know, I'm gonna feel really stupid if it turns out that this is all just elaborate performance art, and you know what? I feel really stupid.
And to be clear, it's not performance art. It's just really strategic content creation. And she's really good at it, I mean, she has almost 10,000 followers.
She's getting a lot of engagement. I'm, of course, feeding into that because I'm a dumbass, um, but you know, it's not hard to find her LinkedIn. Maybe this is my conspiracy theory time now?
Anyway, put on your tinfoil hats, people! Anyway, her LinkedIn - she describes herself as "a seasoned digital media expert with 10+ years experience in content strategy. " She has a lot of presence online in different forms of content creation, And you know what, she's really good at it.
"] We may never know 100% for sure what her true deal is, but regardless, just don't go giving her a hate follow, or comments, or anything boosting her algorithm. It's not worth it. Regardless, if you see someone online "teaching history" with no sources, and you ask them for sources, and they ignore, block, or get mad at you, maybe just disregard everything you just heard them say.
So all of this junk going down on TikTok is frustrating enough. Some of it is perpetuated on purpose, some not. But what happens when someone sets out to tell a fictional story and completely loses control of it, because it wasn't formatted like one?
What happens when you accidentally weaponize the pain of lost LGBT history? [music: melancholy woodwinds] Disclaimer: this one isn't TikTok, but I think it's still relevant to the point. In 2018, a Twitter user named Guillem Clua began writing a long, very long, Twitter thread talking about how; while visiting a cemetery in Sighișoara, Romania; he chanced upon a World War One gravestone where two men are buried together.
Emil Muller and Xaver Sumer. The thread, now marked with hashtag #EmilYXaver went on to, in real time, detail Guillem's journey discovering this story behind these two mysterious soldiers. He found out that the two men went to high school together in their small town.
He posted photos of his investigating, the locations he was visiting around the city, following clue after clue. And over time, a heart-wrenching story takes shape. He discovers that Emil and Xaver were lovers forced to be apart by their families, and they were reunited just before they were shortly separated once more by death.
Guillem wrote, "I finally put a face on the two soldiers. I put their photographs next to each other, but their gazes are riveted on mine. And through space and time, I see them in a common supplication: "Tell our story or we will never exist.
"" I saw this thread as it was coming out in 2018, and as I read through it, my heart felt trapped in my throat. I remember laying in bed, reading it on the verge of tears, because as Guillem visited local residents connecting hints and clues, reading through letters and paintings, watching this hidden story unfold, a love lost to time, finally resurfacing a hundred years later - as many before us have said, Emil and Xaver were just born too soon. It's exactly what made me so passionate about queer history in the first place.
Uncovering, reinterpreting, and loving these histories is so valuable. It gives our community a past to hold onto, and gives us the opportunity to posthumously pay back some much-deserved love and acknowledgment to those who came before us. It's extremely grueling, difficult, emotionally-taxing work that is frequently met with severe backlash.
So finding stories like this is like finding a diamond in a muddy river. It's like one in a million. A story like this is every queer historian's dream.
Except the story isn't true. It's just fiction. And Guillem Clua was extremely open about it, after the fact.
The photos were planned and staged. No one knows truly what the story behind these two soldiers was, but they were real people. But because the thread wasn't in English, and because it was paced out over the course of several days and took the form of a Twitter thread, many people had absolutely no idea that it was fake.
The headstone is real, after all. It was truly presented as fact, by accident, and not by accident, somehow at once. Guillem didn't clearly acknowledge it as fiction until the story was over.
So obviously, people felt extremely blindsided and betrayed. Because of course they did. Most of the great fervor surrounding the story came from excited and hopeful LGBTQ readers - I was one of them.
Having the wind knocked out of our sails felt like the pain of lost history repeated. The queer community, like any marginalized community with a history of having our stories forcibly erased, is an absurdly bad community to use as the subject of a performance like this. Guillem himself acknowledges this pain on one of his tweets in the thread: "Has their story not been erased once, as has happened to millions of other soldiers who rest under the soil of the whole continent?
It was not fair for me to abandon them again in that tomb of oblivion. " He was incredibly defensive when the backlash began rolling in, too. Clapping back in a tweet saying, 'Do you really think LGBT history won't be taken seriously just because someone wrote a love story on Twitter?
Yeah, actually. Medieval queer historian Jonah Kaman wrote a great article on this whole debacle, noting, "Yes, LGBT history won't be taken seriously because of a Twitter story. When it all plays out on the background of the history of queer historiography, 'making history' itself, which for decades has been and still is being perceived as fake, a liberal or deviant fantasy.
You know what the term is for historical fiction presented as truth? Propaganda. Queer history in and of itself has historically been perceived as 'gay propaganda,' weaponized for the advance of the 'homosexual agenda'; not an intellectual pursuit or a right of people to have a past.
Alex Drce-Francis makes a great point on Twitter that 'this story willfully overwrites local experiences, imposes templates on them, makes still unheard stories harder to research and recover. '" This story was very personal on an even deeper level for Jonah, who was born in Romania, not that far from where the Emil Y Xaver story takes place. The story already hurt the queer community at large.
The sting is much more potent for Eastern European queer folks who have a very unique struggle to deal with. Incidents like Emil Y Xaver put a spotlight on how fragile people's trust in history is. How easy it is to swindle online users into believing a story if you frame it the right way, especially when the community you're targeting is so, so hungry for a shared history of our own.
A history that did exist and is out there, but is subject to an absurd level of scrutiny at every turn. Seriously, every time I make videos on LGBTQ historical figures, I get met with a flood of comments from pissed off people, yelling at me for "lying about this person's Identity," or "turning everything gay. " Even when I clearly have sources cited.
People are already primed to disregard queer history as fabricated, to scrutinize it with an intensity that they never afford anything else. Incidents like Emil Y Xaver not only make that problem worse, it also smacks the LGBTQ community with one more smack of betrayal, letting us taste a story we had lost, before tearing it away again. As an artist, I can sympathize with Guillem Clua's instinct to protect the integrity of his art when defending himself against criticism, especially since he himself is a gay man.
But that doesn't erase the pain that it caused. Still, this is why you have to realize that doing the work as a servant of history is long, hard, and extremely complicated. Sources need to not only be cited, but carefully vetted.
Details are easily missed or lost. Doing research on a deadline will wear you down until there's nothing left but your bones. I have some bad news.
[music: anxious, circusy accordion] Putting on my dunce hat for this section. [giggles] I've spent this whole video dunking on people who have spread historical misinformation, and yeah, they all deserved it. But it would be ridiculous and hypocritical of me to pretend that I've never f***** up myself.
I mean, with the frequency that I put out videos, and the sheer amount of information and essays and books that I need to juggle. It's impossible to not take an L sometimes, no matter how hard I try. So, time to atone for my sins by calling them out.
In my first Victorian Medicine video a few years ago, I said that Thomas Crapper invented the flushing toilet. This is not true, despite the fact that it said so on a seemingly reviewed UCLA website. Dammit, UCLA.
I shouldn't have trusted you. Mr Crapper did improve the flushing mechanism, though. In that same video, I also f***** up and said that Ibn Sina was Arab, when he actually was Persian.
Sorry. In my Lighthouses video, I meant to say John Brown, not James Brown. Shame, shame, shame, shame.
In my James Dean video, I called Sal Mineo a gay man. He was actually bisexual. Sorry to bisexuals across the world.
You can have your poor little meow meow back, he's all yours. I got this one mixed up because when reading the sources for that video, it was primarily sources from the 60s and 70s, when it was really common to be calling anyone with same-sex attraction flat-out gay, so. Whoops.
Anyway, are these offenses the end of the world? No. And when they do pop up, I try my best to put a note in the description or the comments to point it out, so definitely check down there when you're watching a video, just in case.
I'm human. I've f***** up, and by God, I'll do it again! But the point is, I'm well aware of like, how serious my job is.
And I don't know how other history creators feel, but I feel like it's a really serious job. It's why, at least for now, I do iterally every part of it by myself, so then I can hold myself accountable for every part of the process. There is pros and cons to this, and honestly, I know at some point I will need to get help, but until then and even after, when I get folks in the comments either pointing out when I oopsied on a fact, or adding more context to something, I really appreciate it.
And that's also why I honestly feel kind of disgusted when people go online and frame themselves as educators in order to get views, but all they do is post unsourced, poorly researched, sensationalist junk. Because then as a result, me and my history pals have to come in and clean the mess up. I guess that means that we'll never run out of stuff to talk about, though.
For better or for worse. The last thing I want you to get out of this video is the idea that I'm making this to make myself look better, and that's not what I'm trying to do at all. I mean, look at my dunce hat.
I just want to point these things out to implore you to be vigilant, aware, and thoughtful about what you learn, and what you log into your brain library as a fact. Don't be too afraid or too proud to unlearn something, or acknowledge what you thought was wrong. And more than anything, these incidents remind me that personally, I can always do better, too.
I appreciate you for trusting me with your learning, I really do, because that trust is a really valuable thing. So until next time, wash thy hands, wear thy mask, and don't punch any babies.
