Can Social Media Actually Teach History? (And Keep the Facts Straight)

Written by Simon Williams

History has a reputation problem. Ask most teenagers to picture a history lesson and they'll think of dates on a whiteboard, not something they'd choose to watch. Yet millions of them are, every day, on the same phones their teachers ask them to put away.

In an Ofcom survey of British teenagers, TikTok emerged as the single most-used news source, with 28% turning to the app for news and current affairs, narrowly ahead of YouTube and Instagram. History content rides the same algorithm: castle tours, "what really happened" threads, reenactments of medieval trials, and creators turning the Tudors or the Blitz into two-minute cliffhangers. For a subject often accused of being dry, that's a remarkable turnaround.

It also arrives at a useful moment. The government's Curriculum and Assessment Review, published in November 2025, called for a national curriculum that is "knowledge-rich" but also relevant to pupils' lives, with subjects like history expected to connect more clearly to the world students actually live in. Social media, whatever its flaws, is already doing that connecting, linking a Roman road to a current infrastructure debate, or a medieval siege to a modern news story about a city under attack. History stops being "the past" and starts being a lens on now.

Why Short-Form Video Works on a Subject Textbooks Struggle With

Good history teaching has always relied on narrative: cause, consequence, character, stakes. Short-form video is built for exactly that. A 90-second clip that opens mid-battle or mid-betrayal does what a textbook paragraph rarely manages: it makes you want to know what happens next.

Devon history teacher Laurie Matthews built an audience of well over 100,000 followers doing precisely this, filming at historic sites and turning lessons into the kind of storytelling she says captures "the magic of the stories" behind the facts. She's not alone. A growing community of UK history teachers now treats TikTok and Instagram as an extension of the classroom rather than a distraction from it, using the format's pace to hook students who'd never pick up a set text voluntarily.

Where It Falls Down: Accuracy Is Not the Algorithm's Job

The same qualities that make social media gripping (speed, simplification, emotional framing) are the ones that make it a poor fact-checker. In an audit of TikTok's search results, misinformation watchdog NewsGuard found that roughly 20% contained false or misleading claims, often appearing within the first five results returned. History is especially exposed to this: a complicated succession dispute or a contested colonial episode compresses badly into 60 seconds, and nuance is usually the first casualty.

Algorithms also reward confidence over accuracy. A creator who states a dubious claim boldly will usually out-perform one who says "historians actually disagree about this," even though the second answer is the more honest one. Over time, that skews what a young audience assumes history even is: a set of neat, settled facts, rather than an ongoing argument built from evidence.

Teaching Students to Read a History Video the Way They'd Read a Source

The fix isn't banning the format, and it wouldn't work if schools tried. It's applying the same source-criticism skills history teachers already teach for primary documents to video content instead. A few habits go a long way:

Check who's talking and what they know. An account run by a museum, university, or working historian carries different weight than an anonymous meme page, even if both look equally polished.

Treat a caption as a claim, not a conclusion. If a video states something as fact, students should be encouraged to ask what the source is, then actually go and check: a book, a museum website, a peer-reviewed article.

Notice what's missing. Short videos have to cut something. The interesting question is often what got left out, and why that might matter.

Watch for the "one weird trick" version of history. If a video claims an entire war, empire, or era can be explained by a single villain or a single cause, that's usually a sign of storytelling winning out over evidence.

What Teachers and Parents Can Actually Do

None of this requires confiscating phones. It requires redirecting the same curiosity a viral video sparks into something sturdier. A student who watches a clip about the Peasants' Revolt and comes to class asking questions is a gift, not a problem, provided someone helps them check the clip against a proper source afterwards. Timing is on educators' side here too: Paul Greengrass's upcoming film The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield as a peasant who triggers the 1381 rebellion against Richard II, is likely to send a fresh wave of curious teenagers searching for the real story once it's released. That's a natural moment to point students toward primary sources such as the Anonimalle Chronicle, rather than leaving the film as the last word on what happened.

Some UK teachers already build this into lessons directly: setting a popular history video as homework, then asking pupils to fact-check it in class using textbooks, archives, or trusted sites, and mark up what the video got right, wrong, or simply skipped. That turns a passive scroll into an active history skill, and it's one that will outlast whatever platform happens to be popular next year.

Boring Was Never the Real Problem

History was never actually boring. It was often just badly delivered, stripped of the stakes and personalities that made it worth knowing in the first place. Social media, for all its faults, has proven that when history is told well and tied to something students recognise from the world around them, they'll watch it voluntarily, at 11pm, unassigned.

The job now isn't to keep young people away from history content online. It's to make sure the habit of checking, questioning, and cross-referencing travels with them from the classroom onto the app, so an interest sparked by a 90-second video grows into something that can survive contact with an exam paper, a primary source, or an argument with a well-informed friend.

Sources used:

• TikTok becoming go-to news source for UK teens, Ofcom survey
• Curriculum and Assessment Review, final report (GOV.UK, Nov 2025)
• Nearly 20% of TikTok search results contain misinformation, NewsGuard
• Devon teacher brings history lessons to TikTok, BBC
• The Uprising (in production), IMDb

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