Middle school gossip page on Instagram

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My 7th grade daughter told me that some anonymous kid started an Instagram page called “ insert school name here” tea. Kids send in gossip about other kids and the senders name is removed. Pretty much every kid in the school follows it. This is horrifying and i think this might actually be common for other schools. The sad thing is that I don’t think there’s anything that can really be done to stop it.

Can you tell us what school please? Parents need to know this stuff because if kids are writing mean stuff they need to know about it.

NP. This happened at my DD's school in Florida 3 years ago. If your child is in middle school, there is school gossip account.

[Anonymous]

My daughter's school has it. It's half "blind items" (guess which popular basketball star asked out the girl known for sucking her hair and eating lunch in the library?) and half "Overheard" items. They love it and find it hilarious.

My daughter, who is small, white, and has long brown hair was out sick for a week. Here's the overheard:

DD: Hi
Mr. G: You're back! You were gone so long I forgot what you looked like.
DD: I still look like this.
Mr. G: So you're not bald, black and bodacious?

[Anonymous]

My kid's middle school has a few of these accounts. You can report them to Instagram but the kids will just start another account.

[Anonymous]

My kid’s MS also has one. I just looked on it and it’s mostly “ship or dip”. Where they pair up couples and then students comment - ship or dip. Seems pretty harmless.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kid's middle school has a few of these accounts. You can report them to Instagram but the kids will just start another account.

It's still worthwhile to tell the school and push for the counseling office and/or administration to be very clear with kids that this is not acceptable. It may be "legal" -- if the kids are over 13 -- but it's not acceptable.

Kids need to start understanding that adults, including their own teachers, counselors and the principal and staff, can and will look at students' online activity and won't hesitate to call them out it.

When a bunch of "ship" postings were running like wildfire through our MS, the principal was all over it the minute she was told about it (by the parents of a student who was very distressed by being pictured on it). Some kids ended up having to go to her office and explain why they felt it was appropriate to publicly post pictures of other kids who had not given permission to them to do so. That nonsense ended fast.

Parents need to be more active about monitoring kids and cracking down if the kids are doing things that are mean or just plain dumb online. It's not a place to experiment with being foolish, despite the fact that many adults treat social media that way. These same kids who find social media gossip funny now are going to be the ones who as seniors are posting pictures of themselves drinking and acting the fool, and yes -- colleges now actually DO look at applicants' social media and where they're tagged on others' social media. Not all the time, no. But enough that parents should be concerned enough to teach their kids to stop thinking everything they post is just for fun.

[Anonymous]

There's nothing Instagram will do is the account owner is 13.

We had one like this at our MS and it eventually faded out. Parents tried to get it taken down by reporting posts but they got those automated responses back that Instagram had investigated and found that blah post didn't violate blah rule.

Our school kind of just threw their hands up like "we can't police what happens outside of school!"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There's nothing Instagram will do is the account owner is 13.

We had one like this at our MS and it eventually faded out. Parents tried to get it taken down by reporting posts but they got those automated responses back that Instagram had investigated and found that blah post didn't violate blah rule.

Our school kind of just threw their hands up like "we can't police what happens outside of school!"

Parents will be a lot less accepting of the school's attitude if online activity blows up into bullying etc. Schools do get involved with cyber-bullying of students by other students, if the principals have spines. I know schools must loathe social media and wish that none of these sites ever existed but they do, and what goes on outside school online can have huge effects AT school day to day.

[Anonymous]

My 7th told us posted that an anonymous site that was devoted to picking couples posted a pic of him next to an inanimate object. He didn't seem to mind but asked the site who had posted it (as he was thinking it was one of his friends). They wrote back and said it was anonymous, but deleted the post.

While that could be the exception, I thought it was interesting that they deleted it when he slightly questioned it.

[Anonymous]

*Our 7th grader told us that...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:notify instagram, and tell the school. the guidance counselor will talk to the kids, or at least at ours did. They approached it in an education issue, teaching them how to responsibily use the internet/social media.

+1 This is how our school would handle it.

[Anonymous]

Do minors have a right to free speech?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There's nothing Instagram will do is the account owner is 13.

We had one like this at our MS and it eventually faded out. Parents tried to get it taken down by reporting posts but they got those automated responses back that Instagram had investigated and found that blah post didn't violate blah rule.

Our school kind of just threw their hands up like "we can't police what happens outside of school!"

Parents will be a lot less accepting of the school's attitude if online activity blows up into bullying etc. Schools do get involved with cyber-bullying of students by other students, if the principals have spines. I know schools must loathe social media and wish that none of these sites ever existed but they do, and what goes on outside school online can have huge effects AT school day to day.

So are you going to lie and said it happens during school hours when it didn't? Or that it affected someone, when it didn't? You'd be surprised how quickly that can haunt you for lying.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My 7th grade daughter told me that some anonymous kid started an Instagram page called “ insert school name here” tea. Kids send in gossip about other kids and the senders name is removed. Pretty much every kid in the school follows it. This is horrifying and i think this might actually be common for other schools. The sad thing is that I don’t think there’s anything that can really be done to stop it.

Report it to the principal and to Instagram. It is about school and therefore school business. Get it taken down asap.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do minors have a right to free speech?

Yes, minors have constitutional rights. However, in the school setting (even public school), the school's (i.e., government's) interest often trumps the individual's, especially when protecting other students. Plus, the right to free speech, even for adults, is not absolute.

[Anonymous]

The repercussions on being on any social media is terrible for college admissions as well as employment.