In February, a Spanish teacher at a Pennsylvania middle school heard disturbing rumors about TikTok, a social media platform she'd never used, so she signed up for an account—and found that there was already a profile using her name. It was one of 20 fake TikTok accounts created by students at Great Valley Middle School in Malvern, 25 miles west of Philadelphia, to impersonate teachers at the school, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The accounts shared racist, homophobic, and lewd videos—ranging from falsified sexual relationships between teachers to posts insinuating pedophilia. The New York Times calls it "the first known mass attack of its kind in the US."
District officials say they consulted with legal counsel and law enforcement and determined that there was little they could do since the social media activity mostly took place off-campus, outside school hours, on personal devices. Some students were briefly suspended, but other than that, the response from the school seems to have been limited to an assembly addressing the situation and messages asking parents to discuss the issue with their kids. Teacher photos were also removed from the school's online directory. Examples of some of the fake TikTok posts:
- The aforementioned Spanish teacher found a real photo of her family at the beach with text reading, "Do you like to touch kids? Answer: Si."
- A photo from a teacher's wedding, with the image of his bride replaced with a photo of a student.
- An image of a partially naked couple in bed, their heads replaced with photos of two male teachers.
A video posted last month featured two students insisting the posts were simply jokes and not a big deal; they said the videos would still be posted, but privately, so teachers couldn't find them. After the
Times article came out, however, that post was deleted and the students seemed to indicate they would no longer impersonate teachers. (More
TikTok stories.)
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