“You know you love me , Xoxo, GossipGirl” is a famous quote from the 2007 show Gossip Girl. Gossip Girl revolves around gossip, rumors, and scandals of wealthy teens in NYC, but instead of their drama being contained in their personal lives, its mass-texted to the entire school through “Gossip Girl.”

So what do drama-obsessed teenagers do when the “Gossip Girl” technique becomes outdated? They turn to social media pages such as instagram. 

One thing that is almost always guaranteed on social media is cyberbullying, Study.com says that cyberbullying initially  kicked off in the 1990’s and 2000’s. Early cyberbullying was done through ”Chat rooms, forums and other early social media sites.” bark.us suggests that the reason for this is that personal computers became more affordable.

Recently multiple accounts using Utah Military Academy’s logo and name have popped up. These accounts are focused on gossip and drama that is circulating around the school. Most of these accounts are private accounts the accept followers exclusively. One of the most popular accounts participating in this is “umaconfession.”

“umaconfession” seems to have taken a lot of inspiration from the show Gossip Girl.  One of these being similar to Gossip Girls “tips”. A “tip” was something that characters of the show could send to the anonymous Gossip Girl, filling them in on drama or speculations, Gossip Girl would then mass text the “tip” to other characters. Similarly “umaconfession” lets cadets directly message the account with their own rumors.

The most notable similarity between Gossip Girl and “umaconfession” is that the person running the account is anonymous, and just like Gossip Girl there are speculations about who runs the account going around, but we can’t prove it until “anonymous “ exposes themself..

Where this page diverts from Gossip Girl is the technique, “Gossip Girl’ used first hand accounts or through words of mouth. What makes”umaconfession” so boring is the fact that the “drama” is just people sending anonymous rants to the account to either improve their own self image or bring others down. “Gossip Girls” mass texts were often well-written, witty, and calculated.  “umaconfession” is often messy and contains poor grammar, vulgar language, and often written with the same skill as a second grader.

Some cadets wait to see what drama has popped up, entertaining themselves with others’ problems. Others who have come across this account haven’t thought of it as “harmless entertainment.”  “The hate pages are unnecessary. It doesn’t bring kindness to people,” said Asher Emans.

The national center of biotechnology information says, “Ease of access and use,speed of information diffusion, and difficulty in correcting false information make control of undesirable information a horrid task”. While these sorts of accounts can take down posts, people who have already seen the posts, will most likely stick with the opinions they formed about something. Something that’s worse than these memories is the possibility of screenshots. Screenshots allow people to save these posts for as long as they want, so while the posts are deleted, the screenshots may still be spread.

What’s even more concerning about these pages is while they are spreading possible-harmful misinformation about cadets, most administrators don’t even know about these accounts. Most administrators are focused on in-person bullying, rather than something that’s discrete, such as a private instagram account.

This account is just not appropriate for UMA. The show Gossip Girl was created because of the reality that conflicts do happen in schools and social arenas. But cadets have a hard enough time dealing with the stresses of school and work and relationships. We don’t need a venue to vent untruths and vicious gossip. What we need is to be built up, to support each other when it is needed most. 

“And who am I? That’s one secret I’ll never tell …You know you love me. XOXO, Gossip Girl”.

 – Gossip Girl