In February, Patrice Motz, a veteran Spanish teacher at Great Valley Middle School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, was alerted by another teacher that trouble was brewing.
Some eighth-graders at her public school had created fake TikTok accounts posing as teachers. Ms. Motz, who had never used TikTok before, created an account.
She found a fake profile for @patrice.motz, which had posted a real photo of her on the beach with her husband and their young children. “Do you like touching children?” a text in Spanish asked above the family vacation photo. “Answer: Sí.”
In the days that followed, about 20 teachers — roughly a quarter of the school’s faculty — discovered they had been targeted by fake teacher accounts filled with pedophile innuendos, racist memes, homophobia, and made-up sexual encounters between teachers. Hundreds of students soon viewed, followed, or commented on the fraudulent accounts.
In the aftermath, the school district briefly suspended several students, teachers said, and the principal reprimanded the eighth-grader for their behavior during a lunch break.
The biggest impact has been on teachers like Ms. Motz, who said she felt “kicked in the gut” that students were so casually attacking teachers’ families. The online harassment has led some teachers to worry that social media platforms are stunting the growth of empathy in students. Some teachers are now reluctant to confront students who misbehave in class. Others said it has been a challenge to continue teaching.
“It was so discouraging,” said Ms. Motz, who has taught at the school in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb for 14 years. “I can’t believe I still get up every day and do this.”
The Great Valley incident is the first known TikTok mob attack of its kind by high school students on their teachers in the United States. It marks a significant escalation in the way that middle school and high school students are posing as teachers, trolling and harassing them on social media. Before this year, students largely posed as one teacher or principal at a time.
The high school students’ attack also reflects broader concerns in schools about how students’ use and abuse of popular online tools is spilling into the classroom. Some states and districts have recently restricted or banned students’ use of cellphones in schools, in part to curb peer harassment and cyberbullying on Instagram, Snap, TikTok and other apps.
Nowadays, anonymous, aggressive messages and memes have become commonplace on social media, leading some children to use these messages as a weapon against adults.
“We've never had to deal with targeting teachers on this scale before,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest U.S. teachers union. “It's not only demoralizing. It can lead teachers to ask themselves, 'Why should I continue in this profession when this is what students are doing?'”
In a statement, the Great Valley School District said it had taken steps to address “22 fictitious TikTok accounts” posing as high school teachers, describing the incident as “an egregious misuse of social media that had a profound impact on our staff.”
Last month, two female students at the school publicly posted an “apology” video on a TikTok account using the name of a seventh-grade teacher as the username. The pair, who did not reveal their names, described the fake videos as a joke and said teachers had taken the situation out of context.
“It was never our intention for it to get to this point, obviously,” one of the students said in the video. “I never wanted to get suspended.”
“Go ahead. Learn to joke,” the other student said of a teacher. “I’m 13 years old,” she added, using a curse word for emphasis, “and you’re like 40, almost 50.”
In an email to The New York Times, one of the students wrote that the fake teacher accounts were intended as a joke, but that some students had taken the impersonations too far.
A TikTok spokesperson said the platform's guidelines prohibit deceptive behavior, including accounts that impersonate real people without disclosing that they are parodies or fan accounts. TikTok said a U.S.-based security team validated ID information — such as driver's licenses — in cases of impersonation and then deleted the data.
Known locally as a close-knit community, Great Valley Middle School educates approximately 1,100 students in a modern brick complex surrounded by a sea of bright green sports fields.
The deceptive TikToks disrupted the school’s balance, according to interviews with seven Great Valley teachers, four of whom asked to remain anonymous for privacy reasons. Some teachers were already using Instagram or Facebook, but not TikTok.
The morning after Ms. Motz, the Spanish teacher, discovered her impersonator, the derogatory TikToks were already an open secret among the students.
“There was an undercurrent of conversation going on in the hallway,” said Shawn Whitelock, a veteran social studies teacher. “I saw a group of students holding up a cell phone to a teacher and yelling 'TikTok.'”
Students took images from the school website, copied family photos that teachers had posted in their classrooms, and found more online. They created memes by cropping, cutting and pasting photos and then overlaying text.
The low-tech “cheap fake” images differ from recent incidents in schools, where students used artificial intelligence apps to generate realistic-looking, digitally altered images, known as “deepfakes.”
While some of the Great Valley teacher impostor posts seemed funny and harmless — like “Remember your states, students!” — other posts were sexualized. One fake teacher account posted a collage photo with the heads of two male teachers pasted onto a man and a woman lying half-naked in bed.
Fake teacher accounts were also tracked, contacting other fake teachers.
“It was really distracting,” Bettina Scibilia, an eighth-grade English teacher who has worked at the school for 19 years, said of the TikToks.
Students also targeted Mr. Whitelock, who for many years was the faculty advisor 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 his wife largely cropped out. The caption mentioned a member of the school's student council, implying that the teacher was married to him. “I'm gonna touch you,” the imposter later said.
““I have built a reputation for 27 years as a teacher who is dedicated to the teaching profession,” Mr. Whitelock said in an interview. “An impersonator assassinated my character — and defamed me and my family in the process.”
Ms Scibilia said a student had posted a graphic death threat against her on TikTok earlier this school year, which she reported to police. The impersonations of teachers made her worry.
“A lot of my students spend hours and hours and hours on TikTok, and I think it just desensitized them to the fact that we are real people,” she said. “They didn’t feel what a violation it was to create these accounts and impersonate us and mock our kids and mock what we like.”
A few days after learning of the videos, Edward Souders, the principal of Great Valley Middle School, sent an email to parents of eighth-graders, describing the deceptive stories as a way to “portray our teachers in a disrespectful way.”
The school also hosted an assembly for eighth graders on responsible technology use.
But the school district said it had limited options for responding. Courts generally protect students’ rights to free speech off campus, including parodying or disparaging teachers online — unless the students’ posts threaten others or disrupt school.
“While we would like to do more to hold students accountable, we are legally limited in the actions we can take when students communicate off-campus during non-school hours on personal devices,” Daniel Goffredo, the district's superintendent of schools, said in a statement.
The school district said it could 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 the TikToks were disrupting the school's “safe learning environment.”
“We need to get the message across that this kind of behavior is unacceptable,” Ms. Salvatico said at a March 18 school board meeting.
The next day, Dr. Souders sent another email to parents. Some of the messages contained “offensive content,” he wrote, adding, “I am optimistic that by working together, we can prevent this from happening again.”
While a few accounts disappeared — including ones with the names Ms. Motz, Mr. Whitelock and Mrs. Scibilia — others popped up. In May, a second TikTok account impersonating Mrs. Scibilia posted several new videos mocking her.
She and other Great Valley teachers said they reported the fake accounts to TikTok but had heard nothing back. But several teachers who felt the videos invaded their privacy said they had not given TikTok personal IDs to verify their identities.
On Wednesday, TikTok removed the account posing as Ms. Scibilia and three other fake Great Valley teacher accounts flagged by a reporter.
Ms Scibilia and other teachers are still processing the incident. Some teachers have stopped posing and posting photos, fearing that students will misuse the images. Experts said such abuse could damage teachers' mental health and reputations.
“That would be traumatizing for anyone,” said Susan D. McMahon, a professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago and chair of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Violence Against Educators. She added that verbal aggression by students toward teachers has increased.
Now teachers like Ms. Scibilia and Ms. Motz are pushing schools to teach students how to use technology responsibly, and to strengthen policies to better protect teachers.
In the Great Valley students’ TikTok “apology” last month, the two girls said they planned to post new videos. This time, they said, they would make the posts private so teachers couldn’t find them.
“We're back and we're posting again,” someone said. “And we're going to make all the videos private at the beginning of next school year,” she added, “because then they can't do anything.”
On Friday, after a Times reporter asked the school district to inform parents about the article, the students removed the “apology” video and deleted the teacher's handle from their account. They also added a disclaimer: “Guys, we don't act like our teachers anymore, it's over!!”
