In February, Patrice Motz, a veteran Spanish teacher at Great Valley Middle School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, was warned by another teacher that problems were brewing.
Some eighth-graders at Motz's public school had created fake TikTok accounts impersonating teachers, and Motz, who had never used TikTok before, created the accounts.
She found a fake profile, @patrice.motz, that had posted real photos of her with her husband and young children at the beach: “Do you like touching kids?”, the message in Spanish read, alongside a photo from a family vacation. “Answer: Yes.”
In the days that followed, about 20 teachers — roughly a quarter of the school's faculty — found themselves victims of fake teacher accounts filled with pedophilic innuendo, racist memes, homophobia, and fictitious sexual relationships between teachers. Hundreds of students were soon viewing, following, or commenting on the fake accounts.
The school district temporarily suspended several students after the incident, teachers said, and the principal reprimanded the eighth-grader for his behavior during lunch one day.
Teachers like Ms Motz have been the hardest hit, feeling “kicked in the gut” by the way students casually attacked teachers' families. Online harassment has left some teachers worried that social media platforms are preventing students from developing empathy. Some teachers are now hesitant to reprimand students for causing trouble in class. Others say it's been hard to continue teaching.
“It was really disheartening,” said Motz, who has taught at a school in an affluent Philadelphia suburb for 14 years. “I still can't believe I get up every day and do this.”
The Great Valley incident is the first known gang-up TikTok attack against a teacher by middle school students in the United States. It marks a significant escalation in how middle and high school students are impersonating teachers on social media to troll and harass others. Prior to this year, students would mostly impersonate one teacher or principal at a time.
The middle school attack reflects broader concerns in schools that student use and abuse of popular online tools is infiltrating the classroom. Some states and school districts have recently restricted or banned students' cellphone use at school to limit harassment and cyberbullying by peers on apps such as Instagram, Snap and TikTok.
Social media now normalizes anonymous offensive posts and memes, leading some children to use them as weapons against adults.
“We've never had to deal with bullying targeted at 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 this damaging to morale, it can make educators question, 'Why do I want to stay in the profession when students are doing this?'”
The Great Valley School District said in a statement that it had taken action against “22 fictitious TikTok accounts” impersonating middle school teachers, in what it described as “a flagrant misuse of social media that has had a serious impact on staff members.”
Last month, two female students at the school posted an “apology” video to a TikTok account using the handle name of a seventh-grade teacher. The two, who declined to give their names, said the impersonation video was a joke and that the teachers had overblown the situation.
“Obviously, we didn't mean to let it get this bad,” one student said in the video. “We didn't want to get suspended.”
“Move on. Learn to take a joke,” another student said of the teacher. “I'm 13,” she added, using an expletive for emphasis, “and you're like 40 trying to turn 50.”
In an email to The New York Times, one student said the fake teacher accounts were clearly meant as a joke, but that some students had taken the impersonations too far.
A TikTok spokesman said the platform's guidelines prohibit misleading behavior, such as parody or accounts that impersonate real people without disclosing they are fan accounts. TikTok said its U.S.-based security team verifies identity documents, such as driver's licenses, in cases of impersonation and then removes the data.
Known locally for its close-knit community, Great Valley Middle School serves approximately 1,100 students in a modern brick building surrounded by bright green playgrounds.
According to interviews with seven Great Valley High School teachers, four of whom asked not to be identified to protect their privacy, fake TikToks have upset the school's balance, even though some of them already used Instagram and Facebook but not TikTok.
By the morning after Motz, a Spanish teacher, discovered she had been impersonated, the derogatory TikTok had already become an open secret among her students.
“There was an unspoken conversation going on in the hallways,” said longtime social studies teacher Sean Whitelock, “and I noticed a group of students holding up their phones in front of the teacher and saying 'TikTok.'”
Students sourced images from school websites, copied family photos that teachers had posted in classrooms, and used other photos they found online. They cut and pasted the photos, overlaying text and creating memes.
The low-tech “cheapfake” images are different to recent incidents at schools where students used artificial intelligence apps to generate lifelike, digitally altered images known as “deepfakes”.
While some of the Great Valley fake teacher posts appeared humorous and harmless, like “Students, remember your state!”, others were sexual in nature. One fake teacher account posted a collage of photos with the faces of two male teachers pasted over a half-naked man and woman in bed.
He also followed the accounts of false teachers and attacked other false teachers.
“It's become such a distraction,” Bettina Sibilia, an eighth-grade English teacher who has worked at the school for 19 years, said of TikTok.
Students also targeted Whitelock, who was the school's long-time student council adviser.
The fake @shawn.whitelock account posted a cropped photo of Whitelock and his wife at a church wedding. The caption included the names of members of the school's student council, implying that a teacher had married Whitelock. The fake account later commented, “I'm gonna touch you.”
““I have spent 27 years building a reputation as a teacher dedicated to the profession,” Whitelock said in an interview. “An impersonator has damaged my character and slandered me and my family in the process.”
Sibilia said students had already posted graphic death threats against her on TikTok earlier in the semester and she had contacted police, and the teacher impersonations only intensified her concerns.
“I think a lot of my students spend hours on TikTok and are just desensitized to the fact that we are real people,” she said. “They didn't realize how illegal it was to create these accounts, impersonate us, and mock our children and the things we love.”
A few days after learning of the video, Great Valley Middle School Principal Edward Souders sent an email to parents of eighth-grade students explaining that the fake account “portrays teachers in a disrespectful light.”
The school also held an 8th grade assembly on responsible technology use.
But school districts said they have limited options to respond: Courts have generally protected students' free speech rights outside of school, such as parodying or disparaging teachers online, so long as their posts don't threaten others or disrupt school.
“While we wish we could do more to hold students accountable, we are legally limited in what we can do when students use personal devices to communicate outside of school hours,” the district's superintendent, Daniel Goffredo, said in a statement.
The school district said it could not comment on disciplinary actions to protect students' privacy.
In mid-March, Nikki Salvatico, president of the Great Valley Education Association, a teachers union, warned the school board that TikTok was disrupting schools' “safe educational environments.”
“The message needs to be sent that this type of behavior will not be tolerated,” Salvatico said at the March 18 school board meeting.
The next day, Dr Souders sent another email to parents, stating that some of the posts contained “disturbing content,” but added that “by working together, I am optimistic that we can prevent this from happening again.”
While some of the accounts, including those using Motz, Whitelock and Sibilia's names, have disappeared, others have appeared, and in May, a second TikTok account impersonating Sibilia posted several new videos mocking her.
She and other educators in the Great Valley said they reported the fake accounts to TikTok but didn't hear back, but several teachers who felt the videos violated their privacy said they didn't provide TikTok with personal ID to verify their identities.
On Wednesday, TikTok removed an account impersonating Ms. Sibilia that was flagged by a reporter, as well as three other fake teacher accounts from Great Valley High School.
Ms. Sibilia and other teachers are still coming to terms with what happened. Some have stopped taking photos and posting them for fear that students will misuse them. Experts say this kind of abuse can damage a teacher's mental health and reputation.
“It's going to be traumatic for everybody,” said Susan D. McMahon, a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago and chair of the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Violence Against Teachers, who added that verbal aggression by students against teachers is on the rise.
Now teachers like Sibilia and Motz are lobbying their schools to strengthen policies to train students how to use technology responsibly and to better protect teachers.
Great Valley High School students took to TikTok last month to “apologise” and said they planned to post new videos, this time making them private so teachers couldn't find them.
“We're back and we're posting again,” one user said. “And we're going to make all our videos private at the start of next school year,” she added. “Then they won't be able to do anything.”
On Friday, after a Times reporter asked the school district to notify parents about the story, 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 as teachers. That's in the past!!”
