Ah, the life of having an Instagram account. The mindless scrolling through your feed, endlessly liking random posts of selective people you just happen to allow on your account. Pretty much everyone has an Instagram account. If you don’t, well…you probably get better sleep at night. 

Of course, a majority of people have Instagram accounts that range from a wide variety. These would include, main accounts, spam accounts and business accounts. You know the gist. But wait, let’s talk about school accounts like the ones at our school. Here, we have the main FHS Mesa page, all the clubs’ pages and the FHS Billies Live page. However, recently we seem to have flipped a switch and taken high school Instagram accounts to a whole new level. Students are using platforms to take on new spins of school life so that their peers can have a laugh looking through them. Have you seen them? I’m sure you have; you can’t miss them, and they are bound to come up in your “suggested”. You know what I am talking about and what they are called. And let’s be honest, you probably follow a few. Let’s name some: 

• Cool fhs teachers
• Fhs eating school lunch
• Cripples of fhs
• Fhs bathroom feet
• Fhs side profiles
• Fhs bad posture
• Fhs poor posture
• Fhs poor parkers inc
• Fhs snoozers
• Fhs rudest people
• Fhs hottest people
• Fhs tea

Yes, these are all funny accounts, and they each cause intrigue, and they cause us to interact with them because we see our friends doing stupid things. But this also poses a question: Are the anonymous accounts helping or hurting kids at our school? 

You could say that these so-called “FHS accounts” are great, but, in my opinion, these accounts are only hurting the kids at our school. Why is this? Having accounts like this can lower kids’ self-esteem (ex: by when you get put on the poor posture website and you really were just studying/taking a test). These accounts (such as FHS Bathroom Feet) can also scare kids into not going into the bathroom because they don’t want their friends to take advantage of them and end up on the site. It is like putting our peers in the zoo and locking them in a cage for everyone to look at and mock at. The accounts are just damaging our reputation as high school students because we are making fun of our peers through posture and such and posting it out to the world. I believe we can stop this damaged path we have created to ruin ourselves. 

The media and TikTok trends can stop if only we recognize that what we are doing is hurtful and everyone here at FHS wants the same thing. We all want a normal high school experience. No one wants to be tip-toeing around classmates and iPhones so as to not end up on some idiotic Instagram account. Let’s stop this now, FHS, and put an end to the humility and build up stronger together again.