In February, Patrice Motz, a senior Spanish teacher at Great Valley Middle School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, was warned by another teacher that trouble was brewing.
Some eighth-grade students at her public school had created fake TikTok accounts using the names of teachers. Ms. Motz, who had never used TikTok, created an account.
She found a fake profile called @patrice.motz that posted a real photo of her at the beach with her husband and young children. “Do you like touching babies?” asked a message in Spanish on a family vacation photo. “Answer: yes.”
In the days that followed, about 20 teachers — about a quarter of the school's faculty — discovered they were victims of fake teacher accounts filled with pedophilia, racist memes, homophobic comments and fabricated sexual relationships between teachers. Hundreds of students soon viewed, followed or commented on the fake accounts.
Teachers said the school district then suspended several students for a short time. During one lunch period, the principal reprimanded some eighth-grade students for their behavior.
The biggest losses have been suffered by teachers like Ms. Motz, who said she felt a “kick in the stomach” that students could so easily attack teachers’ families. The online harassment has left some teachers concerned that social media platforms are helping to prevent the development of empathy in students. Some teachers are now hesitant to call out students who misbehave in class. Others said it has been challenging to continue teaching.
“It was very frustrating,” said Ms. Motz, who has taught at the school in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia for 14 years. “I can’t believe I still get up and do this every day.”
The Great Valley incident is the first known such group TikTok attack by middle school students in the United States on their teachers. It is a striking example of how middle and high school students impersonate, troll, and harass teachers on social media. Prior to this year, students would impersonate one teacher or principal at a time.
The onslaught of middle school students also reflects broader concerns in schools about how students' use and abuse of popular online tools is intruding on the classroom. Some states and districts have recently banned or banned online tools. Banned student cellphones It will be used in schools to limit peer harassment and cyberbullying on Instagram, Snap, TikTok and other apps.
Now, social media has helped normalise anonymous offensive posts and memes, leading some kids to weaponise them against adults.
“We haven't had to deal with targeting teachers on this scale before,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the U.S. “Not only is it demoralizing. It can make teachers ask, 'Why do I stay in this profession if students are doing this?'”
The Great Valley School District said in a statement that it had taken steps to shut down “22 fake TikTok accounts” created using the names of teachers at the middle school. It called the incident a “gross misuse of social media that has deeply impacted our staff.”
Last month, two students from the school posted a public “apology” video on a TikTok account in the name of a seventh-grade teacher. The two did not reveal their names but described the fake video as a prank and said the teachers had blown the matter out of proportion.
“We never wanted this to get this far,” one student said in the video. “I never wanted to be suspended.”
“Go ahead. Learn to take a joke,” another student said of a teacher. “I'm 13,” she added, using an expletive for emphasis, “and you're 40 or 50.”
In an email to The New York Times, one student said the fake teacher account's purpose was clearly to be a joke, but some students took the pseudo-teacher account too far.
A TikTok spokesperson said the platform's Guidelines Prohibit deceptive behavior, including accounts that pose as real people but do not disclose that they are parodies or fan accounts. TikTok said a U.S. security team verified identifying information — such as driver's licenses. In impersonation cases And then deleted the data.
Great Valley Middle School, known locally as a close-knit community, serves approximately 1,100 students on a modern brick campus surrounded by lush playing fields.
Fake TikTok upset the school's balance, according to seven Great Valley teachers interviewed, four of whom requested anonymity for privacy reasons. Some teachers already used Instagram or Facebook, but not TikTok.
The day after Spanish teacher Ms. Motz discovered her impersonator, the outrageous TikTok videos had become an open secret among students.
“There was this secret discussion going on throughout the hallways,” said longtime social studies teacher Shawn Whitlock. “I saw a group of students holding cellphones in front of the teacher and saying, ‘TikTok.'”
Students took pictures from the school website, copied family photos posted in classrooms by teachers and also found other pictures online. They created memes by cropping, cutting and pasting pictures, then superimposing text.
The low-tech “cheap fake” photos are a contrast to recent incidents in schools where students used artificial intelligence app Generating realistic-looking, digitally altered images known as “deepfakes”.
While some of the Great Valley teacher hoax posts seemed funny and benign — such as “Students, remember your states!” — other posts were sexual. One fake teacher account posted a collaged photo with the heads of two male teachers pasted over a man and woman partially nude in bed.
Fake teacher accounts also targeted other fake teachers.
“It’s become too much of a distraction,” Bettina Sibilia, an eighth-grade English teacher who has worked at the school for 19 years, said of TikTok.
Students also targeted Mr. Whitlock, who for years was the faculty adviser to the school's student council.
A fake @shawn.whitelock account posted a photo of Mr Whitelock standing in a church during his wedding, with most of his wife cropped out. The caption contained the name of a member of the school's student council, implying the teacher had married her. The fraudster later commented, “I'm gonna touch you.”
,“I spent 27 years building my reputation as an educator who is dedicated to the teaching profession,” Mr. Whitlock said in an interview. “A fake individual assassinated my character — and defamed me and my family in the process.”
Mrs Sibilia said a student had posted a graphic death threat against her on TikTok at the start of the school year, which she reported to police. The people identified as teachers added to her concern.
“Many of my students spend hours and hours on TikTok and I think that desensitized them to the fact that we are real people,” she said. “They didn't realize how violating it was to create these accounts and impersonate us and make fun of our kids and make fun of what we love.”
A few days after learning about the video, Great Valley Middle School Principal Edward Souders emailed parents of eighth-grade students, explaining that the fake account “portrayed our teachers in a derogatory manner.”
An 8th grade assembly on responsible technology use was also held at the school.
But the school district said it has limited options to respond. Courts generally protect students’ rights to free speech off campus, including parodying or insulting teachers online — as long as students’ posts don’t threaten others or disrupt school.
“Although we wish we could do more to hold students accountable, we are legally limited in what we can do when students communicate on personal devices off campus during non-school hours,” district Superintendent Daniel Goffredo said in a statement.
The district administration said it could not comment on any disciplinary action to protect students’ privacy.
In mid-March, Nikki Salvatico, president of the teachers union, the Great Valley Education Association, warned the school board that TikTok was disrupting the school’s “safe educational environment.”
“We have to send the message that this type of behavior is unacceptable,” Ms. Salvatico said at the March 18 school board meeting.
The next day, Dr. Souders sent another email to parents. He wrote that some of the posts contained “offensive content,” adding: “I hope that by addressing this together, we can prevent this from happening again.”
While some accounts disappeared — including those using the names of Ms. Motz, Mr. Whitlock and Mrs. Sibilia — others reopened. In May, a second TikTok account impersonating Mrs. Sibilia posted several new videos mocking her.
He and other Great Valley teachers said they reported the fraudulent account to TikTok but received no response. But several teachers who felt the video violated their privacy said they did not provide any personal ID to TikTok to verify their identities.
On Wednesday, TikTok removed the account created in Mrs. Sibilia’s name as well as three other fake Great Valley teacher accounts flagged by a reporter.
Mrs Sibilia and other teachers are still processing the incident. Some teachers have stopped taking and posting photos so students don't misuse their pictures. Experts said such abuse can harm teachers' mental health and reputation.
“It would be traumatic for anyone,” he said Susan D. McMahonProfessor of Psychology at DePaul University in Chicago and Chair of the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Violence Against Teachers. She said that Verbal aggression of students against teachers It was increasing.
Now teachers like Mrs Sibilia and Ms Motz are pressing schools to educate students about using technology responsibly – and to strengthen policies to better protect teachers.
In an “apology” to the Great Valley students on TikTok last month, both girls said they planned to post new videos. They said this time they would keep the posts private so teachers couldn’t find them.
“We're back and we'll post again,” one said. “And we're going to personalize all the videos at the beginning of the next school year,” she added, “because then they can't do anything.”
On Friday, after a Times reporter asked the school district to notify parents about the article, the students deleted the “apology” video and removed the teacher's handle from their accounts. They also added a disclaimer: “Guys, we are no longer acting like our teachers are a thing of the past!!”