THE FRAUD and fraudulent TikToks

Helping students analyze the fake, the misleading, and the fraudulent

A book to read: THE FRAUD

Guys, Zadie Smith is a really good writer.

I know, I know. This is old news. But somehow I’ve missed WHITE TEETH and SWING TIME and everything else. With high expectations, I requested THE FRAUD from the library and waited for the other hundreds of people to read it, and then read it in three days.

It’s H I L A R I O U S. Smith trolls her characters so hard.

The first part of the book centers on Eliza Touchet, the cousin William Ainsworth, a washed-up writer. It must have been a delight for a writer to write about an insufferable writer and his terrible prose. Some examples:

• The book begins when his library caves in, the “sheer weight of literature you’ve got here, well, that will put a terrible strain on a house.”

• “Eliza had long understood her cousin to be beyond the reach of editorial intervention.”

• “Old age had only condensed and intensified his flaws. People ejaculated, rejoined, cried out on every page…passages repeated. She read of Boxgrove’s ‘richly-carved wainscoting’ at least half a dozen times.

And then, Zadie Smith trolls us modern people, via her characters. The primary “fraud” of the book is a fleshy, large, low-class dude who claims to be a long-lost heir to the Tichborne baronetcy and estates.

Trials are held. Frenzied crowds rally around the ridiculous man, despite all evidence pointing to his fraudulence. At rallies, “all present had the strongest possible feeling about [Tichborne], and many elaborate theories of conspiracy regarding him.”

Readers cannot help but make comparisons to Trump and his MAGA worshippers.

Things twist in the middle of the book, where the story turns from Mrs Touchet to Andrew Boyle. Boyle, star-witness in the Tichborne trial, was born into slavery in Jamaica and had been living in London. Through his eyes, we learn of Jamaica (the real Jamaica, not the islands as Ainsworth writes about them), slavery, racism, and colonialism.

In the end, Zadie Smith trolls us well-meaning White ladies too. Mrs Touchet, for all her abolitionist meetings, still lectures Boyle’s son on how justice must wait for Parliament, how she understands his plight (being a Scot and a woman, after all), and is surprised at his eloquence and education. In the end, Boyle’s bitter fury and “daily battle of life…was one she could no more envisage living herself than she could imagine crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon.

In summation, the book is brilliant.

A lesson to teach: Not believing everything you see on TikTok

I don’t want my students to be like those gullible, ridiculous British people at the Tichborne trial, railing against the crooked media, and only believing stories told by the loudest sources who speak in easy-to-digest soundbites.

It’s tough to teach students to spot sketchy information and not believe everything they see on social media. A few things make this hard:

• It’s not part of our curriculum, per se. History teachers don’t have a unit on how to analyze news stories. Instead, we have to infuse it into every single unit. We know this is one of our most important tasks as teachers, but it’s still often tucked into the corners of our curriculum.

• Everything changes so fast. You cannot recycle these lessons from year to year. 2022 examples are totally out of date now. In 2016, my lessons revolved around Facebook. In 2020, it was Instagram. I’d be laughed out of my classroom if I suggested students still frequent these platforms.

• Students are always convinced they know fake news when they see it. Some teachers get around this by teaching a fake story, tricking kids into believing you and your fake news. However, if you teach students a fake story, half the students will feel stupid that they’ve been tricked (not ideal) and the other half won’t get it and will leave class believing the false story (also not ideal).

I solve the curriculum problem by giving “fake news” a specific place in each unit. When studying the Enlightenment, students debate whether Voltaire would have approved of “fake news,” it being free speech and all. When we study WWI propaganda, I’ll have students analyze today’s propaganda tool: TikTok.

I have students find and analyze misleading TikTok. They have to break down how they discover the misinformation.

I start class with an example: This TikTok influencer often gives misleading advice about anxiety and chronic health. In this TikTok, the influencer claims that “your body does not know the difference between what you are thinking and what you are experiencing.” Therefore, to “heal chronic illness, regardless of your situation,” one must “align your thoughts with something healing, spend your time visualized yourself healed.” Here it is:

Sorry to my readers with chronic illnesses. That was probably infuriating to watch.

Next, I show students the TikTok influencer’s website. Her credentials include that she is a “Certified Master NLP Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner.” A Google search reveals that one can become a NLP after an 11-day online course. Her TikTok claims that she is a “nervous system practitioner,” which is another online credential, not medical training as one might think.

Her website features various healing courses for sale, which is likely her main goal in building a TikTok audience. To conclude the lesson, I find an article that disputes the specific health advice that she touted on her TikTok. Here is one, here is another.

I talk through this process in front of the classroom as I’m researching in real-time in front of my students. I show students how I find and analyze her website, how I research her “credentials” and how I find sources to dispute her claim.¹

Then I have students try it out. Their assignment: find a lying or misleading TikTok, investigate the creator, guess at the motivation behind the lie, and find a source that disputes the TikTok’s claim. Here is the checklist that guides student work.

Britain and Jamaica, from others.

Back to THE FRAUD. In the book, Mrs. Touchet makes fun of Ainsworth for writing about Jamaica even though he’d never been to Jamaica. I’ve never been to Jamaica, and I don’t know whether or not to trust whether everything is as perfect as this TikTok would have you believe:

So let’s explore the island through some other newsletters, shall we?

Makeda beautifully writes about British colonialism, racism, and sovereignty here:

My Five Reasons Jamaica Is, Still, A Third World Country’| Third World Diary

And Emma writes about environmental activism and local Jamaican politics here:

The candidates spoke

Since we’re traveling through THE FRAUD, we may as well explore Britain as well. I have, actually, been to London. I was there for about 15 hours on a layover nearly 15 years ago. While I have vague memories of walking along the Thames, we’d better read Jeffrey’s newsletter instead of relying on my sketchy memories:

Thames Barges

Happy reading, researching, teaching and traveling! See ya next Sunday :)

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1. Another example is this TikTok, claiming that Biden is lying about the fact inflation is coming down. However, this and this inflation data supports Biden’s claim (and disputes the TikTok) This TikTok on inflation is also interesting to look at. Carefully chosen facts hide the fact that inflation has fallen dramatically since June of 2022.