Rye Middle School Squashes Real Life “Gossip Girl” Blog

A real life Rye “gossip girl” was posting information about his or her middle school classmates on ryegossipgirl.tumblr.com until school social worker Peter Green requested the blog’s anonymous owner to deactivate the site, according to MyRye.com. "Gossip Girl" is a popular soapy television series about students at an elite private New York high school whose secrets are followed closely and spilled by the anonymous “gossip girl.” 

On April 9, Green sent a letter to RMS parents and discussed the site in a student assembly; he explained “the site creators were using the site to answer anonymous questions and speculate openly about the personal lives and behavior of their peers," according to the copy re-posted on MyRye. 

Green said the blog is potentially harmful and asked parents to talk to their kids about how this kind of behavior could be hurtful. He also mentioned the Rye Youth Council’s a direction the group took partially in response to last summer’s hazing incident.  

Apparently the site creators did not remove the site when Green first posted, but since the letter was sent home to parents it has been deactivated.

But while the gossip site is gone, other Rye middle school student blogs that talk about their private lives and about each other still exist. With one google search, Patch found at least three ask.fm sites created by students who use their real names and who include links to their Facebook profiles, which have some photos and information available to the public. On these sites, the girls talk about their classmate’s private lives, as well as their own. They list their best friends, who they are no longer friends with, their celebrity crushes, likes and dislikes and some of the postings are sexual.

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One Rye student discusses ryegossipgirl.tumblr.com in a posting from Wednesday, April 10. She was prompted by this anonymous question: whats you're opinion on ryegossipgirl? and the assemble?

Her response:

ryegossipgirl is stupid and the assemble finally got the page to go down but the thing is that the things that ryegossipgirl said weren't her things to tell and thats wrong. Its like are you really that immature to ruin someone's day and humiliate them in front a lot of people. LIKE GROW UP ALREADY YOUR GOING INTO HIGH SCHOOL NEXT YEAR JESUS...

There was an anonymous posting on another Rye middle school student’s ask.fm site from five days ago that reads:  

"gossip girl here. your one&only source into the scandalous lives of westchester's elite. -dear readers, to read the caption about the photo you have to click the link where it says when the post was posted. xoxo gossip girl" OMGG WTF IS THISSS

According to this particular site the Rye gossip girl site had existed once before in the past and was then back again.

Rye is not the first place where students’ real life gossip girl sites prompt school staff to take action. Ever since the show launched in 2007, communities have seen hurtful copy cat sites. The series ended in 2012, but the concept lives on.

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What do you think about middle school students using the internet to gossip and post personal information? How do you handle this with your child? Please share your opinions in the comments.

Not sure if you know what is really going on with your kid's social media page? Test your knowledge with this Instagram quiz. (Be ready to fail.)

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