BY OLIVIA CAHALANE
A COMPANY that runs discos for West Cork teens has discovered several social media accounts using images from their events in a negative way.
Operator of the popular ‘Rev’ discos, Revolution Teen Events, recently discovered social media accounts sharing images of disco-goers and ‘rating’ them.
These social media accounts used photos of people attending the discos in places such as Bandon and Riverstick, taken from Revolution Teen Events’ official Instagram page. The accounts rated people’s outfits, hair, make-up and more. The comments on all these posts were enabled, allowing others to contribute.
After being contacted by parents, Revolution Teen Events posted on their Instagram page, that they condemned the actions of these accounts and said they had reported the TikTok accounts. To ensure that this wouldn’t happen again, they also took down all professionally taken photos from their Instagram account and said they are going to stop posting photos of people.
A second post on Instagram, directed towards the individual or individuals running the accounts, said they were giving them 24 hours to disable the accounts, or they would be pressing charges with the gardaí. The accounts were deleted shortly after.
Jamie Leahy, organiser of Revolution Teen Events, said: ‘We received a few emails and WhatsApps from parents informing us that their children were experiencing cyberbullying on TikTok, using our brand name, which we had no idea about, nor did it have anything to do with us.’ Parents said that their children were afraid to go to future discos in case they were photographed and ended up on one of the platforms, he said.
The accounts have been deleted and Jamie added: ‘The parents only wanted the pages deleted, their children’s photos to be taken down and for the bullying to stop, so no further action was taken.’
