- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.”
If my kids did that I’d be perfectly fine with them getting kicked out of school or even if the teachers wanted to press charges. I know teachers can be shitty but this is completely uncalled for unless they were actually doing those things
Just a reminder that these are middle schoolers, if it were your kid, and a teacher decided to sue, it would be you getting sued for the behavior of a child you didn’t raise correctly.
So don’t try to take the high road here. If your kid did something like this, it would be because you were a shitty parent who didn’t teach them basic right and wrong.
“I’d let the state punish them on my behalf” is just revealing the issue: you expect other people to raise your kids.
Absolutely not correct at all I’m afraid.
People seem to think we have the ability to control our kids to a huge degree.
Plenty of children with amazing, loving upbringings turn into garbage people. And some of the nicest most kind people I know were raised by abusive scum.
Plus teenage years are difficult for most kids as they find their place in the world and their friends have almost as much influence as parents at that time.
You also can’t know what teenagers are doing all the time. Especially at school.
Furthermore some people seem to just be born assholes and it doesn’t matter how you raise them.
I’m going to assume you don’t have teenagers. They can change into a different person overnight once the hormones kick in.
Yeah, it’s one of those things a parent can’t control, undue influences. Not just media, but other students and even adults who find their way into a child’s life and attempt to influence them.
The idea that parents actually have or even should have complete control over their kids is laughable. Did you perfectly obey all of your parents wishes while you were young, even when they were not watching?
He’s not talking about obedience, he’s talking about liability. There’s a difference between raising your kid to take out the garbage on command and raising them to be functional people. These parents failed that second aspect. And yes, they are in fact responsible for letting their little sociopaths out of the house.
No, a child that makes a mistake is still potentially functional. Peer pressure is a hell of a drug.
This isn’t 2+2=5. It’s not forgetting to pay for your groceries one time. It’s not even tying your shoe laces in a knot instead of a nice bow. Those are mistakes.
This is a group of kids setting out to humiliate and potentially incriminate teachers at their school for apparently no good goddamn reason according to this article. This is a group of sociopaths failed by their parents. Yes, the children should be punished. The parents should also be punished. Idk how that punishment should go, but IMHO it should involve mandatory community service at a soup kitchen every weekend for a year or two.
No, even good kids are capable of making much more severe mistakes depending on their environment. To really judge we’d have to go through their social media exposure whatever trends/cultures were going around the school at the time.
Don’t forget, this is America where a former President and current candidate supported Qanon. People, especially kids, are vulnerable to being misled.
And this is exactly the time to teach them that this is not acceptable behavior. Sometimes, the best lessons in life are when you learn what to NOT do.
Reading some of these responses, I swear these people are armchair parents. There’s an entire science of nature vs nurture. Nurture also includes peers and group acceptance and even the best of kids sometimes do horrible, shitty, stupid things for nurture of their peers.
It’s like they do not want to entertain that this happens. Head. In. The. Sand.
Source: Am parent with a good kid who is learning to push boundaries, entering the teen years soon, and sometimes does stupid shit even when I taught him better. I was also the good kid that did stupid fucking shit every once in a while despite having parents who taught me better/right v wrong.
When I was young, I was not terribly good at taking responsibility for my own mistakes, especially if I could blame my parents instead.
Because the ends justify the means?
What do you mean with your question? What those students did is slander and mobbing. Those are prosecutable offenses.
No they aren’t. Slander is a civil tort (not criminal / not prosecutable), and “Mobbing” isn’t even a legal term, but to the best of my understanding is synonymous with “assembling”, which is constitutionally protected.
At worst, a student could be sued by a teacher, and these are middle schoolers, so it would be the parents being sued.
I think “assembling” in this context refers to collecting personal information about someone with the intend to steal someones identity. So yes, I guess the teachers could maybe sue for identity theft or online impersonation as well even if creating a fake social media profile for someone without their knowledge in itself does not seem to be a crime on a federal level. There seem to be some state laws concerning this tho - in Texas for example that can be a felony if I get this right. But also yes, that should be the parents’ problem, since minors are usually not criminally liable.
Identity theft is really only limited to contract law, not social impersonation. This would still be libel / slander.
If so the kids might just got lucky in that regard. There seems to be or at least there was a bill in Pennsylvania that would make online impersonation a crime with a maximum sentence of two years in prison and a 5000$ fine. I assume that this story is likely to fuel the discussion about this bill again, if it has not already been enacted into law yet.
Slander is a civil matter, and there is no crime called “mobbing.”
I meant that comment in regard to
If they actually did those things, it wouldn’t be slander.
If I were to guess, I’d take it as “unless the kids knew/suspected with good reason they were doing those things”, because that’s how I would feel about it at least. I would still want to talk to them about appropriate responses and make sure they knew they could trust me, but kids don’t always know how to bring up adults’ misbehavior.
If it’s just a fluke, that would feel like an ends justifying the means situation.
It would be harassment whether or not it’s true, so the teachers would still have reason to sue.
I just hope something happens with their parents too, because kids who do things like this tend to have shitty parents.
I’d like to first of all say that I don’t see any reason to believe the teachers did this. I hope the police proceed under that assumption unless evidence leading otherwise turns up. My original comment was about why someone might not want their children punished as severely, if the teachers did in fact do these things to their students, but I don’t think it’s likely (and really hope it’s not the case).
That’s true, but it’s probably not a huge concern. Middle schoolers under that kind of pressure will react without thought to consequences and if their most grievous response is to harass their abusers, most courts would probably recognize that. I would still explain to them that they can trust me and that I’ll believe them if they tell me something like this in the future, before it gets to this point.
Agreed.