In February, Patrice Motz, a veteran Spanish teacher at Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, was warned by another teacher that trouble was brewing.
Some eighth-graders at his public school had created fake TikTok accounts posing as teachers. Motz, who had never used TikTok before, created an account.
She found a fake profile of @patrice.motz, who had posted a real photo of herself on the beach with her husband and young children. “Do you like touching children?” asked a text in Spanish over the family vacation photo. “Answer: Yeah”.
In the following days, regarding 20 teachers — roughly a quarter of the school’s faculty — discovered they were victims of fake teacher accounts riddled with pedophile innuendos, racist memes, homophobia and fabricated sexual relationships between teachers. Hundreds of students viewed, followed or commented on the fraudulent accounts.
As a result, the school district briefly suspended several students, according to teachers. During a lunch, the principal reprimanded the eighth-grade class for its behavior.
The biggest fallout has been for teachers like Motz, who said she felt “stomach-sick” that students would so casually attack teachers’ families. Online bullying has left some teachers worried that social media is helping to stifle the development of empathy among students. Some teachers are hesitant to call out misbehaving in class. Others say it has been a challenge to continue teaching.
“It was very discouraging,” said Motz, who has taught at the school, in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb, for 14 years. “I can’t believe I still get up and do this every day.”
The Great Valley incident is the first known group attack of its kind on TikTok by high school students targeting their teachers in the United States. It marks a significant escalation in the way middle and high school students impersonate, troll and harass teachers on social media. Before this year, students would pose as one teacher or principal at a time.
The attack by the high school students also reflects a broader concern in schools regarding how students’ use and abuse of popular online tools is interfering in the classroom. Some states and districts have recently restricted or banned cellphone use in schools, in part to limit peer bullying and cyberbullying on Instagram, Snap, TikTok and other apps.
Now social media has helped normalize anonymous aggressive posts and memes, leading some young people to turn them into weapons once morest adults.
“We haven’t had to deal with attacks on teachers on this scale before,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the U.S. “It’s not just demoralizing. It might push teachers to ask themselves, ‘Why am I still in this profession if students are doing this?’”
In a statement, the Great Valley School District said it had taken steps to address “22 fictitious TikTok accounts” posing as teachers at the school. It described the incident as “a serious misuse of social media that deeply impacted our staff.”
Last month, two students at the school posted an “apology” video on a TikTok account using the name of a seventh-grade teacher. The pair of girls, who did not reveal their names, described the fake videos as a prank and said teachers had blown the situation out of proportion.
“We never wanted to go this far, obviously,” one of the students said in the video. “I never wanted to get suspended.”
“Turn the page. Learn to joke,” the other student said of a teacher. “I’m 13,” she added, using an expletive for emphasis, “and you’re like 40 going on 50.”
In an email to The New York Times, One student said the fake teacher accounts were intended as obvious pranks, but some students had taken the impersonations too far.
A TikTok spokeswoman said the platform’s guidelines prohibit deceptive behavior, including accounts that impersonate real people without disclosing that they are parody or fan accounts. TikTok said a U.S.-based security team validated identifying information — such as driver’s licenses — in impersonation cases and then deleted the data.
Great Valley High School, known locally as a close-knit community, serves regarding 1,100 students in a modern brick complex surrounded by a sea of bright green athletic fields.
TikTok imposters have upset the school’s equilibrium, according to interviews with seven Great Valley teachers, four of whom requested anonymity for privacy reasons. Some teachers already used Instagram or Facebook, but not TikTok.
The morning following Motz, the Spanish teacher, discovered her impersonator, the derogatory TikToks were already an open secret among the students.
“There was a constant buzz throughout the hallway,” said Shawn Whitelock, a longtime social studies teacher. “I noticed a group of students holding up a phone in front of a teacher and saying, ‘TikTok.’”
Students took images from the school website, copied family photos that teachers had posted in their classrooms, and found others online. They made memes by cropping, cutting and pasting photos, then overlaying text.
The images cheapfake Low-tech hacks differ from recent incidents at schools where students used artificial intelligence applications to generate lifelike, digitally altered images known as deepfakes the ultra-fake.
While some of the posts from the Great Valley teacher impostor accounts seemed humorous and harmless—like “Memorize your facts, students!”—others were sexually explicit. One fake teacher account posted an image collage with the heads of two teachers stuck onto a partially naked man and woman in bed.
Fake teacher accounts also followed and interacted with other fake teachers.
“It became a distraction,” said Bettina Scibilia, an eighth-grade English teacher who has worked at the school for 19 years, referring to TikToks.
Students also attacked Whitelock, who for years served as the school’s student council adviser.
A fake account @shawn.whitelock posted a photo of Whitelock standing in a church during his wedding, with his wife mostly cropped out. The caption named a member of the school’s student council, implying that the professor had married him instead. “I’m going to touch you,” the imposter later commented.
“I spent 27 years building a reputation as a professor dedicated to the profession of teaching,” Whitelock said in an interview. “An impostor assassinated my reputation, and slandered me and my family.”
Scibilia said a student had already posted an explicit death threat once morest her on TikTok earlier in the school year, which she reported to police. The teacher impersonations increased her concern.
“A lot of my students spend hours and hours and hours on TikTok, and I think they’ve become desensitized to the fact that we’re real people,” she said. “They didn’t realize how violating it was to create these users and impersonate us and make fun of our kids and what we love.”
Just days following learning of the videos, Great Valley Middle School Principal Edward Souders sent an email to parents of eighth-graders describing the imposter accounts as portraying “our teachers in a disrespectful light.”
The school also held an eighth-grade assembly on responsible use of technology.
But the school district said it had limited options to respond. Courts generally protect students’ right to free speech outside of school, including parodying or disparaging teachers online, unless the students’ posts threaten others or disrupt the school curriculum.
“While we would like to be able to do more to hold students accountable, we are legally limited in the actions we can take when students communicate off-campus during non-instructional hours on personal devices,” Daniel Goffredo, the district’s superintendent, said in a statement.
The district said it might not comment on any disciplinary action, to protect student privacy.
In mid-March, Nikki Salvatico, president of the Great Valley Education Association, a teachers union, warned the school board that TikToks were disrupting the school’s “safe educational environment.”
“We need to get the message out that this type of behavior is unacceptable,” Salvatico said at a school board meeting on March 18.
The next day, Souders sent another email to parents. Some messages contained “offensive content,” she wrote, adding: “I am optimistic that if we address this together, we can prevent this from happening once more.”
While some accounts disappeared — including those using the names Motz, Whitelock and Scibilia — others reappeared. In May, a second TikTok account impersonating Scibilia posted several new videos mocking her.
She and other Great Valley teachers said they had reported the imposter accounts to TikTok but had not received a response. But several teachers, who felt the videos had violated their privacy, said they did not provide TikTok with personal identification to verify their identities.
On Wednesday, TikTok removed the account impersonating Scibilia and three other fake Great Valley teacher accounts flagged by a journalist.
Scibilia and other teachers are still processing the incident. Some have stopped posing for photos and posting pictures, to prevent students from misusing the images. Experts said such abuse might damage teachers’ mental health and reputations.
Susan McMahon, a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago and chair of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Violence Against Educators, said: “This would be traumatizing to anyone.” She added that verbal attacks by students once morest teachers were on the rise.
Now, professors like Scibilia and Motz are pushing schools to educate students regarding responsible technology use and strengthen policies to better protect teachers.
In the Great Valley students’ “apology” on TikTok last month, the two girls said they planned to post new videos. This time, they added, they would make the posts private so teachers mightn’t find them.
“We are back and we are going to post once more,” one of them said. “And we are going to make all the videos private at the beginning of the next school year,” she added, “because then they won’t be able to do anything.”
On Friday, following a Times reporter asked the school district to notify parents regarding this article, the students deleted the “apology” video and removed the teacher’s handle from their account. They also added a disclaimer: “Guys, we’re not pretending to be our teachers anymore, that’s a thing of the past!”
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