The video opens with a school superintendent lip-syncing a love song, but he’s not the only performer.
AI-generated versions of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein join him on the ballad—a splice between Will Joseph Cook’s “Be Around Me” and a rewrite of the song by Beth McCarthy on TikTok—with Epstein mouthing the words, “Oh my god, did he call her baby, maybe?”
The clip, posted to the Instagram account @thewyliefiles, has been liked more than 107,000 times. Its caption reads like a large language model’s overview of the Wylie Independent School District in Collin County, Texas, where the singing superintendent was formerly employed, boasting about its “strong academics” and “wide range of extracurriculars.” A top comment reads, “Gem alarm!” suggesting that passersby have struck gold in their daily scroll.
The skit is just one example of a new AI-video meme trend on Instagram and TikTok that students have invented to mock the school’s faculty and sometimes attack their reputations, seemingly for the sake of virality. These largely student-run accounts have earned the nickname “slander pages” online. They’re a digital mutation of the average high school prank, but with potentially much higher stakes.
The “slander page” posts use slang terms that originate from unsavory parts of the internet. “Looksmaxxing” lingo, which comes from manosphere forums that teach men how to be more attractive, is commonly used in these memes, including words like “mog,” which means to dominate another man with one’s looks, and “sub5,” which was coined to refer to people who are subhumanly ugly.
Some “slander” videos use the AI image-to-video tool Viggle AI, which gives creators the ability to insert any photographed person into any reference video, as well as animate a static image into a lip-sync video format. Viggle AI was described as “a new frontier in the creation of spontaneous extremist propaganda” by the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, an academic research arm of King’s College London, in a recent blog post. The platform boasts over 40 million users as of February. Viggle AI did not respond to a request for comment.
In one since-removed “slander” video using Viggle AI that was posted on TikTok, a teacher’s face was superimposed over someone twitching in a bathroom. The text overlay caption read, “Take fent or be useless,” labeling the seizure as a fentanyl high.
The posters behind these pages also use morphed extremist symbols. In one example, some teachers are let into the fictional realm of Agartha, which is a key setting in neo-Nazi occultism where everyone is white and blond. The faculty in the edit are depicted with glowing white eyes to indicate that they’re allowed into Agartha or given red eyes to show that they’re denied.
In the case of Crandall High School in Crandall, Texas, the situation has gotten more extreme. Memes by a viral TikTok account called @crandall.kirkinator have broken containment from the local Crandall user base, inspiring TikTokers with hundreds of thousands of followers—and no discernible ties to the school—to amplify “slander” against Crandall teachers. Viral video skits have even acted out scenarios in which administrators chastise students making these posts.
Administrators at Crandall High School declined to comment on the situation, but at the end of January, all of the content on the @crandall.kirkinator TikTok account was wiped and replaced with a statement acknowledging that the coinciding Instagram account had been deleted. “My Instagram account was not banned, it was deleted by me voluntarily … Some teachers were being harassed, spam-called, or emailed by random people, which was never my intention … The account was created as a joke and was never meant to escalate this far,” the statement read. Days after the statement was posted, the account started posting again on TikTok. Last week, it was deleted entirely.
