Psychology Professor Is Going Viral For Debunking TikTokers Sharing 'Facts' That Are Completely Made Up

Dr. Inna told Bored Panda that she originally began making videos last June, aimed at her summer PSYC 101 online students. "By winter, I noticed other qualified psychology accounts, such as @tallpsychology, work to address misinformation, and more of it showed on my FYP. I thought I should help… and as soon as I started doing that, people started tagging me in more and more fake fact videos," she explained the inspiration behind her TikToks.

The professor also went into detail with Bored Panda about her journey towards becoming an educator. "I grew up in Soviet Ukraine. I wanted to be a teacher since 1st grade, but kept changing my mind about the subject based on my then-favorite teachers. In high school, though, I ended up in a 'pedagogical class' for aspiring future teachers—and we had a psychology class. That’s when I decided I would rather be a psychologist, but Soviet universities had unofficial but real quotas for Jewish applicants, and so it wasn’t possible," she said.

Because of these restrictions, Dr. Inna's life took a slightly different turn than she wanted. However, through a lot of effort, she ended up teaching psychology in the end. "I graduated from a local Pedagogical Institute with a degree in mathematics and informatics (computers, today) instruction, and taught math for a year and half. But then we immigrated, as refugees, and so I took advantage of the possibilities in the US to pursue psychology. I accidentally ended up in an MS program that wasn’t going to make me a school psychologist like I wanted, because I didn’t understand the system. However, that’s when my advisor there persuaded me to go for a doctorate, and it was during that part of my education that I rediscovered my passion for teaching," she told Bored Panda.

"I love teaching at my community college, where I have awesome departmental colleagues who value research and academic depth but truly prioritize our students. Sometimes, I wish I could teach a larger variety of classes, but I make up for it by incorporating what interests me in what I do teach. Psychology is a new science, not even 150 years old, officially—watching it grow and getting my students (and my TikTok audience) interested in it is very exciting for me."

Dr. Inna added that she's currently banned from posting on TikTok because of a misunderstanding on their part. She was banned for multiple 'violations' because she answered a question about tattoos in academia and had photos of her colleagues' arms and legs in one of her videos.

"My removed comments had academic source links—that is NOT against published guidelines at all. My muted videos were addressing blatant misinformation about my academic subject, respectfully and with sources. Please have an actual human who understands the nature of my work look at this," she wrote to TikTok.

Meanwhile, Dr. Inna’s videos reminded me of a chat about double-checking sources that I had earlier with Lee McIntyre from Boston University.

He told me that we should focus on finding accurate and reliable sources of information, instead of double-checking every teeny-tiny tidbit of info we come across. We wouldn’t be able to keep up this sort of in-depth fact-checking because we’d end up exhausted very quickly. So it’s far easier to find who we can trust.

“It would be exhausting to fact check every single news item we hear. In fact, insisting on this degree of skepticism is something that demagogues use to get us to be cynical, because when we doubt that it is possible to know the truth—even when it is staring us in the face—we are riper to their manipulation. So I’d say the best thing with news is to do a little investigation into finding a reliable source,” he said.

“Look for an organization that does investigative journalism (and doesn't just repeat information from other sources), double sources its quotations, discloses conflicts of interest, etc. Once we've found that we can relax a bit and trust the reporting behind the stories. Do we still need to be on guard? Yes. Even The New York Times can make mistakes. Or individual reporters can have biases. But that doesn't mean 'all sources are equal.'"