A viral TikTok video in which a woman claiming to be a substitute teacher rants about a school firing her for failing to respect a student’s decision to identify as a cat was an “experiment” to show how “dangerous” fake news really is.
“Okay, okay. I’ve got to rant for a minute,” the teacher says in a the hoax TikTok video. “Just when I thought school couldn’t get any weirder, it did today.”
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According to Newsweek, the video’s creator made the story up as an exercise to “create awareness” of so-called fake news.
After deciding to “fact check” whether the video has spread online, she found it on several outlets who fell for her lies.
“I’m grateful for the people who reached out and asked me about it, but I’m disappointed … how fake news is made. I was not fired,” she warns.
So outlets who earnestly reported what this teacher claimed in an video online are somehow guilty of spreading “fake news”?
Update: We have updated our headline and article after learning about the hoax. We had originally taken the teacher’s rant at face value and erroneously reported that she had been fired for refusing to meow back at a student. These claims have now been retracted and the article updated.
