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.”
What do you mean with your question? What those students did is slander and mobbing. Those are prosecutable offenses.
Slander is a civil matter, and there is no crime called “mobbing.”
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.
Man they bringin RICO against these kids. “Assembling”. Mobbing someone means attacking them as a group. One of the kids is gonna flip and he’s gonna go life the rest of his life in Timbuktu.
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.