Author name: moderat ereport

by Aliyya Swaby ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice. In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. “Put your hands up,” she says, while a classmate flickers the lights on and off. As the camera pans across the classroom, several girls dramatically fall back on a desk or the floor and lie motionless, pretending they were killed. When another student enters and surveys the bodies on the ground in poorly feigned shock, few manage to suppress their giggles. Throughout the video, which ProPublica obtained, a line of text reads: “To be continued……” Penny Jackson’s 11-year-old granddaughter was one of the South Greene Middle School cheerleaders who played dead. She said the co-captains told her what to do and she did it, unaware of how it would be used. The next day, she was horrified when the police came to school to question her and her teammates. By the end of the day, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department charged her and 15 other middle school cheerleaders with disorderly conduct for making and posting the video. Standing outside the school’s brick facade, Lt. Teddy Lawing said in a press conference that the girls had to be “held accountable through the court system” to show that “this type of activity is not warranted.” The sheriff’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident. Widespread fear of school shootings is colliding with algorithms that accelerate the spread of the most outrageous messages to cause chaos across the country. Social videos, memes and retweets are becoming fodder for criminal charges in an era of heightened responses to student threats. Authorities say harsh punishment is crucial to deter students from making threatening posts that multiply rapidly and obscure their original source. In many cases, especially in Tennessee, police are charging students for jokes and misinterpretations, drawing criticism from families and school violence prevention experts who believe a measured approach is more appropriate. Students are learning the hard way that they can’t control where their social media messages travel. In central Tennessee last fall, a 16-year-old privately shared a video he created using artificial intelligence, and a friend forwarded it to others on Snapchat. The 16-year-old was expelled and charged with threatening mass violence, even though his school acknowledged the video was intended as a private joke. Other students have been charged with felonies for resharing posts they didn’t create. As ProPublica wrote in May, a 12-year-old in Nashville was arrested and expelled this year for sharing a screenshot of threatening texts on Instagram. He told school officials he was attempting to warn others and wanted to “feel heroic.” In Greene County, the cheerleaders’ video sent waves through the small rural community, especially since it was posted several days after the fatal Apalachee High School shooting one state away. The Georgia incident had spawned thousands of false threats looping through social media feeds across the country. Lawing told ProPublica and WPLN at the time that his officers had fielded about a dozen social media threats within a week and struggled to investigate them. “We couldn’t really track back to any particular person,” he said. But the cheerleaders’ video, with their faces clearly visible, was easy to trace. Jackson understands that the video was in “very poor taste,” but she believes the police overreacted and traumatized her granddaughter in the process. “I think they blew it completely out of the water,” she said. “To me, it wasn’t serious enough to do that, to go to court.” That perspective is shared by Makenzie Perkins, the threat assessment supervisor of Collierville Schools, outside of Memphis. She is helping her school district chart a different path in managing alleged social media threats. Perkins has sought specific training on how to sort out credible threats online from thoughtless reposts, allowing her to focus on students who pose real danger instead of punishing everyone. The charges in Greene County, she said, did not serve a real purpose and indicate a lack of understanding about how to handle these incidents. “You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence,” she said. “Did those charges make that school safer? No.” When 16-year-old D.C. saw an advertisement for an AI video app last October, he eagerly downloaded it and began roasting his friends. In one video he created, his friend stood in the Lincoln County High School cafeteria, his mouth and eyes moving unnaturally as he threatened to shoot up the school and bring a bomb in his backpack. (We are using D.C.’s initials and his dad’s middle name to protect their privacy, because D.C. is a minor.) D.C. sent it to a private Snapchat group of about 10 friends, hoping they would find it hilarious. After all, they had all teased this friend about his dark clothes and quiet nature. But the friend did not think it was funny. That evening, D.C. showed the video to his dad, Alan, who immediately made him delete it as well as the app. “I explained how it could be misinterpreted, how inappropriate it was in today’s climate,” Alan recalled to ProPublica. It was too late. One student in the chat had already copied D.C.’s video and sent it to other students on Snapchat, where it began to spread, severed from its initial context. That evening, a parent reported the video to school officials, who called in local police to do an investigation. D.C. begged his dad to take him to the police station that night, worried the friend in the video would get in trouble — but Alan thought it could wait until morning. The next day, D.C. rushed to