Taking Twitter Too Far

At prep school, there is a certain standard to which all students and faculty hold themselves in public. While most prep schools in the country have positive reputations, the students see a different side of boarding school life that onlookers do not. It is the side that most schools do not want others to know about—the side that could tarnish such a pristine reputation. Some prep school students around the country, however, sought an outlet to share with each other the behind-the-scenes, less-pristine sides of their schools. In the past couple months, social media has unified prep school students and their scandalous confessions with the Twitter account @prepfessions.Taking a peek at the account, run by an unknown, anonymous boarding school student, one will immediately see secrets and inappropriate stories of what goes on at the mentioned high schools. When published, the tweets do not attribute the confession to a person, but instead include the name of the school the submitter attends. Tweets include “‘Andover was my safety school’ - Exeter” and “‘the ones who make fun of us are also the ones who's application got rejected’ -New England prep schools.” Although these comments may seem offensive to some, they really are all lighthearted. No one has the intention of hurting anyone else’s reputation. Additionally, the audience of the page knows that the jests and flaws written about these schools are both extremely humorous and at times true. The very reason this Twitter account has grown to be so popular—now with 10.6 thousand followers—is because of its reliable reflection of people’s real thoughts.“‘Where the entire school including faculty owns a Barbour and a Patagonia’ -Blair” and “‘A kid got kicked out for throwing a clementine at another student’s door’-Salisbury,” while hilarious, are on the saner side of the spectrum of submissions, as opposed to “‘A few nights ago one of the largest boys dorms had to have a “porn talk” with the health teachers.’-Exeter.” From all over, kids are admitting crazy prep school happenings.This does, still, beg the question: is anyone doing anything about this?While scrolling through the Twitter page, one encounters some things that would be better not posted in such a public setting. In some cases, it is obvious that faculty are at least somewhat aware of @prepfessions; a tweet from Peddie School about their dean later ended up in a presentation to the school. Though not true of all the tweets on the page, this one was nothing malicious: “‘Our dean calls us his lambs… He is our shepherd’ -Peddie School.” Although people are aware of this site and its popularity on the web, it seems that nothing has been done to stop it as of yet.There are still unanswered questions. Is it okay for students to be posting this? What is the penalty for revealing drug-related/sex-related/other information that goes on at one’s school? Some of the posts violate school rules in serious ways, and posting them for everyone to see is daring, if not wrong. One could think, considering the slandering of these prestigious schools such as our own, that a person might want to track down the creator of the Twitter page and shut it down. For various reasons, however, that is growing increasingly difficult.First of all, the account is anonymous. Further, the owner of the page is only posting what so many other students have shared with him/her; he/she is not the sole creator of all of this material. And if somehow the page was shut down, there are still other pages trying to convey the same message. These pages are not as popular, but they have similar names to the original and post similar material.Since the posts do not mention any names, it is almost impossible to find guilty parties for the acts described in these tweets. The only time it might be easy to identify people on the page is from pictures, and the pictures usually have nothing wrong with them; they’re just students from prep schools saying hello.Boarding school faculty might not be able to stop the reputation-threatening comments being written for all to see on @prepfessions, but maybe it does not matter. The fanbase of the account already knows what goes on. Maybe that is why the page has not been stopped. It is all perfectly known by prep school students that prep school has a dark side.