Editor’s Note:
Students: Is there a story in your school community involving questions of justice and social media? This article first appeared in Lamoille Union High School’s student newspaper, the Blue and Gold, but you don’t need a student newspaper at your school to report on the issues that matter to young people. The Underground Workshop is an open, inclusive network of student journalists from across Vermont. Our menu of current opportunities is here; any student is welcome to join our Thursday workshops; and registration is now open for our major project this Spring: “A Climate Report Card for our Schools.” For more information, please contact the Workshop’s editor, Ben Heintz, at ben@vtdigger.org.
Meme justice: When does ‘calling out’ cause more harm?
by Adelle Macdowell, Lamoille Union High School
What does it mean to hold someone accountable?
This is one question surrounding a meme page on Instagram that has been posting content that names individual students at Lamoille Union High School. To some, the page is a forum for “calling out” inappropriate or harmful behavior. School administrators, though, believe the content on the page causes additional harm and conflict.
The Instagram account has been around at least since June of 2019, but the old owner of the account stopped posting that month. The account was inactive for more than two years, until the current owner of the meme page began posting on the account in early December 2021, putting the meme account back on the radar of many Lamoille Union students. As of January 3, 2022, the page had 208 followers, and most recent posts have received between 40 and 90 “likes.”
“I’m friends with the old owner,” the student who currently runs the account wrote in response to a direct message on Instagram. “They passed (the account) down to me because I’m still in school.”
The owner said they keep their identity secret from nearly everyone, and declined an in-person interview to maintain the secrecy around their identity. “The old owner of course (knows), but that’s about it,” they said. “I have a VPN and I’m not logged into the account on my phone, only on my laptop at home.” They said they are never active on the account at school, since they said it’s “too risky.” Sometimes, they admitted, it’s tempting to tell their friends that they run the account, “but I know that’ll do no good for me so I keep it to myself,” they said.
The majority of memes posted on the account are submitted by LUHS students who DM them to the owner. On occasion, though, the owner said, “some people have (messaged) me, told me some info and asked me to make it into a meme.” The account’s owner emphasized that they are careful not to reveal the identity of students who submit memes, keeping the DMs confidential and making sure not to “leak their names.”
The posts on the page range from rape accusations to attacks on the physical appearance of some students. Some memes call students out for alleged predatory or racist behavior. Many of the memes use popular meme formats, and students who submit them add text naming people and situations.
Bethany Turnbaugh, the dean of students, said that the meme page content has left some students distraught. “Really private information is being shared,” she said.
Interim principal Bethann Pirie said she’s been working to get to the bottom of the issue. “When someone is feeling as though their environment is not safe or comfortable at school, like it’s a hostile environment,” she said, “that’s when we’re like, ‘we need to look into this,’ and so we could open an investigation.” Pirie says that both the owner of the account and the students who submitted memes will be held accountable if the identity of the owner is discovered.
Pirie is concerned that some memes on the page may violate the school’s bullying, harassment and hazing policy. The LUHS student handbook states that “bullying” is something “repeated over time,” and“harassment” targets a “student’s or their family’s actual or perceived race or color, creed, national origin, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, or disability.”
It’s unclear whether content on the page meets these criteria. There are a few students who are repeatedly named in memes for alleged sexual assault, but none of the posts attack an individual based on their background or identity. Even if the memes don’t qualify as harassment or bullying, Pirie said “they could still violate our code of conduct… It’s causing harm to students, whether it is about a protected category or not.”
Students have different opinions about the content posted on the page. For some, it is “all fun and games,” or a way to hold people accountable for misbehavior. Some students, though, raised concerns about how targeted and public the page is.
“I don’t think I was bullying anybody,” said an anonymous student who submitted content to the Lamoille meme page naming another student who vandalized a school bathroom. “I don’t have anything against the person I made memes about,” she said, and added that she submitted memes as a joke, and that she thinks the person they’re about found them funny.
“I think it’s terrible,” said senior Kaylee White. She said she thinks the page puts some students on edge. “There’s…(a) threat that you don’t have control over what gets said about you and who sees it.”
White agreed that students need to be held accountable for their actions. However, she said, “no one should be targeting people like that online, or in any way.”
“There’s been lots of claims of students in school being rapists, or like, sex offenders,” said senior Hayden Cheever. “I’m torn, because I feel like it’s important to like, make stuff known… but you know, at the same time, this is cyberbullying.”
Cheever follows the page, but said he doesn’t interact with the content. “I just really have to agree with something to ‘like’ it in this context,” he said. “I don’t want to give whoever’s running it what they’re looking for.” Cheever said what they’re looking for is a reaction. “The only important stuff is holding people accountable,” he said.
Mai Lyon, a sophomore, said she thinks “it’s like an all fun and games thing.” The older posts on the account, from 2019, were “kind of mean,” she said, “but this has kind of just all been jokes.”
With difficult topics like sexual assault, Lyon believes that the meme page can be a good way to share information. “It’s a situation where it’s (hard) to speak out,” she said. “It’s tricky, but if somebody is going to make a meme about it, the fact that it’s funny is going to spread it around, and it’s going to get people to see it, and it’s going to get people to acknowledge it.”
Principal Pirie pushed back on this sentiment of vigilante justice. “This is not a way forward,” she said. “I just don’t believe that. I don’t believe that publicly shaming someone is a way.”
Pirie said that conflicts and allegations will be dealt with through the proper avenues. “If there was an issue, that issue will be addressed,” she said. “But now you’re creating another issue that is, in fact, a violation of a school district policy.”
“The hard thing for me is that… I can’t figure out who’s doing it,” said Pirie. She explained that she has repeatedly reported the page and contacted Instagram to get it taken down.
Samuel Prevost is the new Student Resource Officer at Lamoille. Prevost previously worked as a dispatcher and then as an officer with the Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department. He started working at the high school in early December, and said the meme page has been on his radar since “day one.”
“It’s narrowed it down,” Prevost said. “(I’m) 99% certain I know exactly who it is.” Despite the precautions the account owner takes, Prevost is confident that he’s figured out their identity, but would not go into detail since it’s an active investigation. “We have ways of (finding out),” he said. “I’m not able to say at the moment how that is.”
While Pirie and Turnbaugh have been focused on the school discipline aspect of the situation, Prevost has been dealing with the legal side. He emphasized that it’s a serious situation. “If you have several people all getting together, harassing and bullying each other, that’s a big deal,” he said. “It is under investigation currently.”
Prevost has contacted Instagram and said that when it comes to social media, “something’s always linked to something else… they have information that goes for miles.”
Prevost said that if there are legal consequences, they will fall on the student who runs the account. “They’re the one who’ll take the hit for everything because they allow it,” he said. In terms of any legal repercussions the student will face, he said “it depends on what the state’s attorney wants to do.”
As Prevost sees it, the account owner has “two really good options” and “one really bad option” going forward.
“One is to shut it down,” said Prevost. Another is to “block whatever hate speech goes on there,” and the third, unadvisable option is to “keep doing what they’re doing.”
Pirie said she hopes that the account owner will shut down the account. “As we try to create a culture that feels safe and inclusive in our school, things like this are harmful,” she said.
The owner of the meme account doesn’t think the school administration should worry so much about the memes themselves, and said “maybe they should care more about the people that are in the memes, like the rapists or the racists.” They added that “all the ‘harmful memes’ include harmful people.”
It’s unclear exactly where the owner draws a line between a meme that is “harmful” and one that isn’t. It raises the questions: Who gets to decide who the “harmful people” are? And when does “calling out” cause more harm?
