A bunch of eighth graders in a “wealthy Philadelphia suburb” recently targeted teachers with an extreme online harassment campaign that The New York Times reported was “the first known group TikTok attack of its kind by middle schoolers on their teachers in the United States.”
According to The Times, the Great Valley Middle School students created at least 22 fake accounts impersonating about 20 teachers in offensive ways. The fake accounts portrayed long-time, dedicated teachers sharing “pedophilia innuendo, racist memes,” and homophobic posts, as well as posts fabricating “sexual hookups among teachers.”
Harassment is serious business. These kids should not be online.
This person is surely in their mid teens as well.
I decided against teaching 2 decades ago and reading this vindicates that decision.
I speak that really from experience. My Reddit account (which I abandoned) is roughly 17 now. Was on other platforms prior.
You can usually tell when you’ve got a teen when they become libertarian and angry about why anyone should care about something edgy being done. The whole “it was just a prank, bro” mindset.
Maybe we misunderstood each other. I meant the children should not be on the internet.
If they are going to do hurtful crap like that they should not be allowed to have smart phones.
Ah Gotcha. I was commenting specifically on the sorts of behaviors i have seen young teens engage in online that shows (not in a bad way, just reveals) that they are young teens.
Again, how is it harassment if it’s just jokes these kids are passing around between each other that are only discoverable by snooping in them?
it’s not really a joke to label a private citizen as a pedophile through impersonation
This was impersonation on the level of “hey look at me, I’m funkless_eck, I’m a pedophile! dur dur dur” not some attempt to make it seem like those teachers were actually pedophiles.
regardless, as a parent and educator, it would be an important lesson to teach wrt boundaries and acceptable behavior
Yeah I’d say it’s equivalent to any other inappropriate joke a kid might tell - a moment for a conversation but not anything too serious.
“it was just a joke bro!”
I mean everyone gets that it was in fact a joke right? What are we talking about here? People are trying to make it sound like the kids were harassing these teachers or trying to trick people into thinking they were pedophiles as opposed to passing around dumb memes about them between each other.
Impersonating someone to suggest sexual relationships threatens their marriage or partnership.
Implying pedofilia threatens their freedom and all their relationships.
This isn’t telling jokes at the lunch table, it’s shouting them in a public forum. Tik Tok is no different than putting up a billboard or running an ad spot on television.
I’d say it’s a lot more like the lunch table, or even like a table at a restaurant off-campus. These kids were not directing these jokes at anyone but each other, but were in a semi-public place where they could be overheard. It’s basically equivalent to a teacher walking by a table full of students making jokes about their teachers by pedophiles and getting them in trouble after overhearing.