Some potentially devastating rumors and lies targeting high school students in Vancouver are surfacing on the social network Twitter.
One student, who alleges her friends at Heritage High were targeted, says that if a teenager is close to suicide these Tweets could push them over the edge.
KOIN saw some of the posts on the sites, which we will not identify. Some of them were so nasty and vile, we can only hint at what they say. A couple accounts have already been shut down, but others have resurfaced to replace them.
Fifteen-year-old Mariah Darrow, a freshman at Heritage, was shocked when she saw that someone had spread a sexually explicit lie about her and a male student on Twitter.
"It scared me when I first saw myself on there," Darrow said. "It's not just my friends that see it. Everybody sees it. It hurt me a lot."
Allie Fry, a 16-year-old sophomore at Heritage, says many of her friends have been targeted.
"I actually had a couple of friends call me crying," said Fry, speaking at her grandparents' home in Vancouver. "You may think it's funny until you're the one put on the site, or... until someone kills themselves because of what someone else said."
Keirstyn Obermiller, also a freshman at Heritage, says she is frustrated because there's apparently no way to determine who is establishing the Twitter accounts, or who's posting the rumors.
"Anybody can send in a rumor, and can just say anything, and they'll put it up anonymously on the page," Obermiller said. "Because we don't know who it is, you can't block that person from doing it, because anybody can do it. Anybody can make a Twitter account and do it again."
"I want them to find out who it is, and I want them to get in trouble. I really do," Fry said. "I know that's bad, but I want them to get in trouble for what they're doing, because it's not right."
Twitter has an estimated 225 million users. It handles 65 million tweets a day.
