Madi Hime is taking a deep drag on a blue vape in the video, her eyes shut, her face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-old exhales with her head thrown back, collapsing into laughter that causes smoke to billow out of her mouth. The clip is grainy and shaky – as if shot in low light by someone who had zoomed in on Madi’s face – but it was damning. Madi was a cheerleader with the Victory Vipers, a highly competitive “all-star” squad based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Vipers had a strict code of conduct; being caught partying and vaping could have got her thrown out of the team. And in July 2020, an anonymous person sent the incriminating video directly to Madi’s coaches.
Eight months later, that footage was the subject of a police news conference. “The police reviewed the video and other photographic images and found them to be what we now know to be called deepfakes,” district attorney Matt Weintraub told the assembled journalists at the Bucks County courthouse on 15 March 2021. Someone was deploying cutting-edge technology to tarnish a teenage cheerleader’s reputation.
But a little over a year later, when Spone finally appeared in court to face the charges against her, she was told the cyberharassment element of the case had been dropped. The police were no longer alleging that she had digitally manipulated anything. Someone had been crying deepfake. A story that generated thousands of headlines around the world was based on teenage lies, after all. When the truth finally came out, it was barely reported – but the videos and images were real.
imagine caring this much about what teens do.
Jesus christ your life must be so boring. I get wanting to be a good influence and stuff but like holy shit dude.
If you don’t care about what teenagers do, you end up with a country full of twats.
If you haven’t noticed it’s not the teenagers that are giant twats it’s the fucking boomers wanting us to all be christo-fascists. They literally elected, “grab her by the pussy” guy.
You dumb?
You dumb?
yeah, which is why you care about people not teenagers
It’s harder to change the behaviour of adults, much easier to grow them right.
yeah and notoriously rebellious and anti-authority teenagers are going to respond well to an authority figure?
nope, you’ve got to give them the framework to be able to conceptualize their experience of the world properly. Which we aren’t doing when we say “no vaping”
It’s a difficult problem, it’s been studied for centuries, there doesn’t seem to be a correct answer to the problem.
Yeah The vape’s going to fucking brain rot them right?
I think the original comment was saying nobody should give a fuck what teens do when it comes to stuff like that, because you can’t prevent it, teens do drugs (nicotine is a drug)
I will add that the only person that should care is the child’s parents, but the same principles apply. They can’t stop them, but they should educate them on the potential downsides of consuming certain things at their age.
Huh. I thought the original commenter meant Why did anyone report on teenage drama in the first place?