\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\n These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. \n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. \u201cPut your hands up,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cTo be continued\u2026\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Penny Jackson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n By the end of the day, the Greene County Sheriff\u2019s Department charged her and 15 other middle school cheerleaders with disorderly conduct for making and posting the video. Standing outside the school\u2019s brick facade, Lt. Teddy Lawing said in a press conference that the girls had to be \u201cheld accountable through the court system\u201d to show that \u201cthis type of activity is not warranted.\u201d The sheriff\u2019s office did not respond to ProPublica\u2019s questions about the incident.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Other students have been charged with felonies for resharing posts they didn\u2019t 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 \u201cfeel heroic.\u201d<\/p>\n In Greene County, the cheerleaders\u2019 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. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t really track back to any particular person,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But the cheerleaders\u2019 video, with their faces clearly visible, was easy to trace.<\/p>\n Jackson understands that the video was in \u201cvery poor taste,\u201d but she believes the police overreacted and traumatized her granddaughter in the process. \u201cI think they blew it completely out of the water,\u201d she said. \u201cTo me, it wasn\u2019t serious enough to do that, to go to court.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cYou\u2019re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence,\u201d she said. \u201cDid those charges make that school safer? No.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.\u2019s initials and his dad\u2019s middle name to protect their privacy, because D.C. is a minor.)<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI explained how it could be misinterpreted, how inappropriate it was in today\u2019s climate,\u201d Alan recalled to ProPublica.<\/p>\n It was too late. One student in the chat had already copied D.C.\u2019s video and sent it to other students on Snapchat, where it began to spread, severed from its initial context.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 but Alan thought it could wait until morning.<\/p>\n The next day, D.C. rushed to school administrators to explain and apologize. According to Alan, administrators told D.C. they \u201cunderstood it was a dumb mistake,\u201d uncharacteristic for the straight-A student with no history of disciplinary issues. In a press release, Lincoln County High School said administrators were \u201cmade aware of a prank threat that was intended as a joke between friends.\u201d<\/p>\n But later that day, D.C. was expelled from school for a year and charged with a felony for making a threat of mass violence. As an explanation, the sheriff\u2019s deputy wrote in the affidavit, \u201cAbove student did create and distribute a video on social media threatening to shoot the school and bring a bomb.\u201d<\/p>\n During a subsequent hearing where D.C. appealed his school expulsion, Lincoln County Schools administrators described their initial panic when seeing the video. Alan shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica. Officials didn\u2019t know that the video was generated by AI until the school counselor saw a small logo in the corner. \u201cEverybody was on pins and needles,\u201d the counselor said at the hearing. \u201cWhat are we going to do to protect the kids or keep everybody calm the next day if it gets out?\u201d The school district declined to respond to ProPublica\u2019s questions about how officials handled the incident, even though Alan signed a privacy waiver giving them permission to do so.<\/p>\n Alan watched D.C. wither after his expulsion: His girlfriend broke up with him, and some of his friends began to avoid him. D.C. lay awake at night looking through text messages he sent years ago, terrified someone decades later would find something that could ruin his life. \u201cIf they are punishing him for creating the image, when does his liability expire?\u201d Alan wondered. \u201cIf it\u2019s shared again a year from now, will he be expelled again?\u201d<\/p>\n Alan, a teacher in the school district, coped by voraciously reading court cases and news articles that could shed light on what was happening to his son. He stumbled on a case hundreds of miles north in Pennsylvania, the facts of which were eerily similar to D.C.\u2019s.<\/p>\n In April 2018, two kids, J.S. and his friend, messaged back and forth mocking another student by suggesting he looked like a school shooter. (The court record uses J.S. instead of his full name to protect the student\u2019s anonymity.) J.S. created two memes and sent them to his friend in a private Snapchat conversation. His friend shared the memes publicly on Snapchat, where they were seen by 20 to 40 other students. School administrators permanently expelled J.S., so he and his parents sued the school.<\/p>\n In 2021, after a series of appeals, Pennsylvania\u2019s highest court ruled in J.S.\u2019s favor. While the memes were \u201cmean-spirited, sophomoric, inartful, misguided, and crude,\u201d the state Supreme Court justices wrote in their opinion, they were \u201cplainly not intended to threaten Student One, Student Two, or any other person.\u201d<\/p>\n The justices also shared their sympathy with the challenges schools faced in providing a \u201csafe and quality educational experience\u201d in the modern age. \u201cWe recognize that this charge is compounded by technological developments such as social media, which transcend the geographic boundaries of the school. It is a thankless task for which we are all indebted.\u201d<\/p>\n After multiple disciplinary appeals, D.C.\u2019s school upheld the decision to keep him out of school for a year. His parents found a private school that agreed to let him enroll, and he slowly emerged from his depression to continue his straight-A streak there. His charge in court was dismissed in December after he wrote a 500-word essay for the judge on the dangers of social media, according to Alan.<\/p>\n Thinking back on the video months later, D.C. explained that jokes about school violence are common among his classmates. \u201cWe try to make fun of it so that it doesn\u2019t seem as serious or like it could really happen,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just so widespread that we\u2019re all desensitized to it.\u201d<\/p>\n He wonders if letting him back to school would have been more effective in deterring future hoax threats. \u201cI could have gone back to school and said, \u2018You know, we can\u2019t make jokes like that because you can get in big trouble for it,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cI just disappeared for everyone at that school.\u201d<\/p>\n When a school district came across an alarming post on Snapchat in 2023, officials reached out to Safer Schools Together, an organization that helps educators handle school threats. In the post, a pistol flanked by two assault rifles lay on a rumpled white bedsheet. The text overlaid on the photo read, \u201cI\u2019m shooting up central I\u2019m tired of getting picked on everyone is dying tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n Steven MacDonald, training manager and development director for Safer Schools Together, recounted this story in a virtual tutorial posted last year on using online tools to trace and manage social media threats. He asked the school officials watching his tutorial what they would do next. \u201cHow do we figure out if this is really our student\u2019s bedroom?\u201d<\/p>\n According to MacDonald, it took his organization\u2019s staff only a minute to put the text in quotation marks and run it through Google. A single local news article popped up showing that two kids had been arrested for sharing this exact Snapchat post in Columbia, Tennessee \u2014 far from the original district.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were able to reach out and respond and say, \u2018You know what, this is not targeting your district,\u2019\u201d MacDonald said. Administrators were reassured there was a low likelihood of immediate violence, and they could focus on finding out who was recirculating the old threat and why.<\/p>\n In the training video, MacDonald reviewed skills that, until recently, have been more relevant to police investigators than school principals: How to reverse image search photos of guns to determine whether a post contains a stock image. How to use Snapchat to find contact names for unknown phone numbers. How to analyze the language in the social media posts of a high-risk student.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know that why you\u2019re here is because of the increase and the sheer volume of these threats that you may have seen circulated, the non-credible threats that might have even ended up in your districts,\u201d he said. Between last April and this April, Safer Schools Together identified drastic increases in \u201cthreat related behavior\u201d and graphic or derogatory social media posts.<\/p>\n Back in the Memphis suburbs, Perkins and other Collierville Schools administrators have attended multiple digital threat assessment training sessions hosted by Safer Schools Together. \u201cI\u2019ve had to learn a lot more apps and social media than I ever thought,\u201d Perkins said.<\/p>\n The knowledge, she said, came in handy during one recent incident in her district. Local police called the district to report that a student had called 911 and reported an Instagram threat targeting a particular school. They sent Perkins a photo of the Instagram profile and username. She began using open source websites to scour the internet for other appearances of the picture and username. She also used a website that allows people to view Instagram stories without alerting the user to gather more information.<\/p>\n With the help of police, Perkins and her team identified that the post was created by someone at the same IP address as the student who had reported the threat. The girl, who was in elementary school, confessed to police that she had done it.<\/p>\n The next day, Perkins and her team interviewed the student, her parents and teachers to understand her motive and goal. \u201cIt ended up that there had been some recent viral social media threats going around,\u201d Perkins said. \u201cThis individual recognized that it drew in a lot of attention.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead of expelling the girl, school administrators worked with her parents to develop a plan to manage her behavior. They came up with ideas for the girl to receive positive attention while stressing to her family that she had exhibited \u201cextreme behavior\u201d that signaled a need for intensive help. By the end of the day, they had tamped down concerns about immediate violence and created a plan of action.<\/p>\n In many other districts, Perkins said, the girl might have been arrested and expelled for a year without any support \u2014 which does not help move students away from the path of violence. \u201cA lot of districts across our state haven\u2019t been trained,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re doing this without guidance.\u201d<\/p>\n Watching the cheerleaders\u2019 TikTok video, it would be easy to miss Allison Bolinger, then the 19-year-old assistant coach. The camera quickly flashes across her standing and smiling in the corner of the room watching the pretend-dead girls.<\/p>\n Bolinger said she and the head coach had been next door planning future rehearsals. Bolinger entered the room soon after the students began filming and \u201cdidn\u2019t think anything of it.\u201d Cheerleading practice went forward as usual that afternoon. The next day, she got a call from her dad: The cheerleaders were suspended from school, and Bolinger would have to answer questions from the police.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t even know the TikTok was posted. I hadn\u2019t seen it,\u201d she said. \u201cBy the time I went to go look for it, it was already taken down.\u201d Bolinger said she ended up losing her job as a result of the incident. She heard whispers around the small community that she was responsible for allowing them to create the video.<\/p>\n Bolinger said she didn\u2019t realize the video was related to school shootings when she was in the room. She often wishes she had asked them at the time to explain the video they were making. \u201cI have beat myself up about that so many times,\u201d she said. \u201cThen again, they\u2019re also children. If they don\u2019t make it here, they\u2019ll probably make it at home.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Tennessee\u2019s Law on School Threats Ensnared Students Who Posed No Risks. Two States Passed Similar Laws.<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n Jackson, the grandmother of the 11-year-old in the video, blames Bolinger for not stopping the middle schoolers and faults the police for overreacting. She said all the students, whether or not their families hired a lawyer, got the same punishment in court: three months of probation for a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, which could be extended if their grades dropped or they got in trouble again. Each family had to pay more than $100 in court costs, Jackson said, a significant amount for some.<\/p>\n Jackson\u2019s granddaughter successfully completed probation, which also involved writing and submitting a letter of apology to the judge. She was too scared about getting in trouble again to continue on the cheerleading team for the rest of the school year.<\/p>\n Jackson thinks that officials\u2019 outsize response to the video made everything worse. \u201cThey shouldn\u2019t even have done nothing until they investigated it, instead of making them out to be terrorists and traumatizing these girls,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Paige Pfleger of WPLN\/Nashville Public Radio contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. Reporting Highlights Felony Charges: In Tennessee, police have arrested and charged students for making or sharing threatening posts on social media. Deterring Threats: Law<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[5313,4516,175,4712,205,3101,247,334,204,6421,1755],"class_list":{"0":"post-12764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-charges","9":"tag-criminal","10":"tag-law","11":"tag-leading","12":"tag-media","13":"tag-posts","14":"tag-propublica","15":"tag-school","16":"tag-social","17":"tag-tennessees","18":"tag-threats"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}