TikTok school abuse: Teachers quitting over paedophile slurs

General Chat In The News
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A craze on the social media app has seen children share videos of staff with inappropriate hashtags and comments and, sometimes, superimposing their faces onto pornography.

A Swansea Valley school said it called the police after staff were secretly filmed and labelled #paedo on the app.

TikTok said it had no place for hateful behaviour, bullying and harassment.

Gemma Morgan, assistant head teacher at Cwmtawe Community School, Pontardawe, said a fake school TikTok account had been set up.

It contained edited videos of virtual parents’ evenings and lessons, as well as covert filming of staff that had been uploaded and doctored.

“They had edited them, put hashtags over the top, they created memes
 there were several hashtags with ‘paedo’,” she said. “Some members of staff had been filmed discreetly within classrooms.”

She said there were “extremely derogatory comments” and “very bad language”.

“In all honesty, things that were of great concern and we engaged with the local police.”

The situation had been “very upsetting” for staff, she said.

NASUWT’s National Official for Wales Neil Butler said the craze was having a “huge detrimental impact on the wellbeing of teachers in schools across the UK”.

“We have examples of teachers going off on sick, on stress, we have examples of teachers leaving the profession, which of course is the greatest worry - we can’t afford to lose experienced teachers from the classroom,” he said. “It’s the last straw really - it was bad enough what they had to go through during the pandemic
 and now [they’re] having to face this.”

Eithne Hughes, Cymru Director at ASCL union, said she had also seen examples of racial slurs and teachers accused of having affairs. “Teachers are looking over their shoulders
 it’s been a very squalid and sorry affair. It’s cruel and unnecessary and the profession should not have to put up with it frankly.”

She said complaints to TikTok had been met in one of two ways: “No response at all, or that it does not violate TikTok’s own protocols, which is extraordinary.”

A spokeswoman for TikTok said: “We are crystal clear that hateful behaviour, bullying and harassment have no place on TikTok. We regret the distress caused to some teachers as a result of abusive content posted to our platform.”

She said the company had deployed additional technical measures and guidance and continued to “proactively detect and remove violative content and accounts”.

The Welsh government said: “It is completely unacceptable that teachers are being targeted with abuse on social media.”

It said it had asked TikTok to remove any instances of inappropriate or offensive content immediately and advise affected staff to report any instances directly to TikTok and contact POSH.

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Another instance of the “lunatics (uncontrolled children) taking over the asylum (the internet)”

:roll_eyes:

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Maybe I’m missing something here, but why can’t they just ban phones? Why are phones necessary in a school day anyway? Surely its better than losing teachers? If I were a headteacher, its certainly something I would be looking at. :woman_shrugging:

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Perhaps it might be better to ban the kids Pixie

:dancing_women:

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 exactly what I was thinking when reading through the above article. Ban TikTok too.

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I agree about banning TikTok as well, because clearly they aren’t taking any action for the content of what’s being posted there. I worry about this world I really do. :frowning_face:

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Where’s the Government’s real concern about this?
Doctoring images in this way should be illegal surely?

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Its probably hard to identify where they came from, @ruthio So many accounts have fake names nowadays, so its probably easy to hide under the radar with these things. I think its disgusting
who even thinks of this being remotely funny??

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