Students now exploit popular platforms like TikTok and Instagram, with accounts using artificial intelligence (AI) to make memes of school faculty comparing them to figures like Jeffrey Epstein and Benjamin Netanyahu. In a student-run account, a video was opened with a school superintendent lip-syncing a love song, followed with an AI-generated versions of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and late sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, joining 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.
