Ohio Media Duped by Fictitious "Slap a Teacher" TikTok Trend

You might have read recently about the "slap a teacher challenge" on TikTok. Turns out that was entirely fabricated by Mark Zuckerberg's Republican henchmen.

I remember sitting in a hotel somewhere in Western Montana with my father back in September 2005. I was moving into my dorm room at the University of Montana the following day, and it suddenly hit me, the smartest teenager in the world, that I had agreed to go to college in a town 1,800 miles away from Marion, Ohio, where I didn’t have any friends.

Enter “thefacebook.com.” I joined that night and scrolled all 13 pages of fellow incoming freshmen. I targeted fellow out-of-state students like myself. (This was back when it wasn’t creepy to message strangers on Facebook.) Within a couple hours of messaging, I had assembled a network of friends that served as my base throughout my two years in the wilderness.

It’s wild for me to think, looking back, that a whimsical site for college kids spawned into the nightmarish monolith it is today. It’s not a stretch to say that Facebook is responsible for more destruction of our social fabric than any other company in the world.

But that’s the risk you take when you give incorrigible nerds like Mark Zuckerberg any modicum of fame and fortune. One day his passion project is a site where Harvard freaks can rate pictures of women. Twenty years later that same site is inciting genocide in Myanmar.

Unfortunately for Facebook—sorry, I refuse to call it “Meta”—it has a geezer problem. The social media site that used to be exclusively for college students has devolved into a hellhole where the world’s stupidest people screech about nonsense and spread wild conspiracy theories.

Kieran Press-Reynolds of insider.com ran an article on Nov. 1st, 2021, entitled, “Facebook wants to attract young people, but Gen Z teens say it's a 'boomer social network' made for 'old people”:

Several Zoomers, many of whom said they used Facebook-owned Instagram but not Facebook's flagship platform, told Insider there's nothing the company could do to get them to sign up.

That makes for tough sledding! Thankfully for Facebook, it’s big enough that it no longer needs to innovate. They can buyout most companies with new products. Those that they can’t, they will steal their ideas.

Facebook has been unable to do that with TikTok, which is all the rage these days among the coveted youth demographic of which I am tragically no longer a part.

What does Facebook do when it can’t bribe or steal? The company hires a battery of GOP goons to smear their competitor.

From Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell of washingtonpost.com:

Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.

Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.

This is the kind of thing that sounds illegal but apparently isn’t. It’s also something that sounds too dumb to be true. Wouldn’t this only make TikTok seem cooler to teenagers if their parents forbade them to use it? But that’s the Republican lobbyist mind for you.

And that’s where their willing patsies, our corporatized media, comes into play. They will run anything as long as it makes their viewers feel some sort of emotion, which is exactly what a story about a disturbing new trend among the youths called the “slap a teacher challenge” would do to most parents and adults who feel some type of way about today’s troubled youths.

The challenge is exactly what it sounds like: Students videotaping themselves slapping a teacher in the face and uploading it to popular social media service TikTok.

It would be alarming news if any of that were true.

Instead, as The Washington Post reports, it’s just one of the many stories that Targeted Victory placed into local media outlets around our state.

But this is how it got ran in local media, from fox8.com:

CARROLL COUNTY, Ohio (WJW) – School officials are warning parents about another dangerous TikTok challenge that urges students to slap teachers and school staff members.

The Ohio School Safety Center issued an alert to Ohio school districts this week warning about the October “slap a teacher” TikTok challenge.

The bulletin said the challenge “encourages students to slap a teacher or staff member and run before being caught” and then post the video. The organization suggests schools warn parents about the trend.

The Ohio School Safety Center, according to its website, is responsible for assisting local schools and law enforcement with preventing, preparing for, and responding to threats and acts of violence, including self-harm, through a holistic, solutions-based approach to improving school safety.

The perfect mouthpiece for a story being pushed by hobgoblin Republican lobbyists. Look at how many outlets fell for this make-believe story:

• Fox 19 (Oct. 1st): “Ohio schools warned about “slap a teacher challenge” on TikTok.”

• Spectrum (Oct 1st): TikTok trend encourages students to slap teachers.”

• Cleveland 19 (Oct. 1st): “Northeast Ohio schools warn about “slap a teacher” TikTok challenge.”

• Fox 28 Columbus: (Oct. 1st): “Ohio School Safety Center warns of “slap a teacher” TikTok Challenge.

• WLWT (Oct. 4th): “Superintendents warn of viral TikTok “slap a teacher” challenge.

• Scioto Post (Oct. 4th): “Schools warn of new TikTok challenge, ‘Slap a teacher’”

This is almost assuredly not an exhaustive list, either. Have students slapped teachers? Hell, I still remember seeing a juvenile delinquent slap my assistant principal back in middle school. I’m sure it’s happened in the modern era and been caught on tape.

But it ain’t a part of a TikTok trend considering the hashtag has zero results on the the app. That means all these media outlets—and this was a national story, remember—ran columns on this disturbing new trend without even going on the free app themselves and checking to see if it’s true. They just took a press release and regurgitated it to their readers because they knew it would create the visceral reaction they desire.

And if it’s this easy to plant a national story like this for some tech gremlin like Mark Zuckerbeg, imagine how the needle can be moved when the full weight of the U.S. government puts its thumb on the scale for a story it wants to push.

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