- 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.”
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.
I dislike the nature argument since it’s often used to entirely sidestep the nurture argument. I think that maybe it might be better as a society to restrict children(not legally) from, or atleast reduce their usage of, social networking and social media sites, atleast until their teens.
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.
Should the teachers be punished as well, given the state’s shared role in raising kids and inculcating them with values?
Clearly they were already punished, and inappropriately so. Nobody “taught” the students to act like little sociopaths in the same way nobody “teaches” your puppy to shit on the floor. This is, in fact, the direct result of a lacking education. This education is not taught in schools outside maybe pre-k, as children are expected to act civilly in a classroom, let alone middle schoolers.
This attack has nothing to do with being “functional people”.
I am not much of a functional person — can’t kept a job, terrible social life, etc — and I would never run this kind of attack on a person let alone join a group to do it en masse.
Being functional has nothing to do with this thing. This is about evil.
Basic empathy is a requirement of being a functional person.
Not a job, not forcing yourself to be around other people, not owning a house, none of that shit.
You are valid so long as you recognize that every person matters. Anything less is to be inhuman.
Like coughcoughisraelcoughcough
To extend the point from above: their tech is your property.
If they do things online with outside hardware you can’t access, then you’ve done what you can.