Dante warns about WhatsApp group with pornography and Nazism – 03/20/2024 – Education

Dante Alighieri, a traditional private school in São Paulo, issued a statement to parents warning about the existence of a group of students on WhatsApp disseminating pornographic content, advocating Nazism and inciting suicide.

According to the statement, in this group, named Meta 500, the participation of students from the 5th to the 9th year of elementary school, that is, children from the age of ten and teenagers, was detected. In the group’s description, according to Dante’s letter, there was the following message: “Don’t add your family, only friends.”

Parents were informed that the group brought pornographic photos, stickers and gifs, photographs of sharp knives, as well as Nazi content and incitement to suicide. According to the statement, this group had a series of unknown telephone numbers, including some from other states and even other countries.

The title of the statement is “Alert – Target 500 risk WhatsApp group: 5th to 9th year of elementary school”. This group is the result of a new WhatsApp tool, channels, which have an unlimited number of members and, according to experts, facilitate the spread of fake news and harmful content.

The school warned of concerns that unknown people may contact students privately, “proposing dangerous challenges or even requesting the sending of intimate photos or money through threats.”

A Sheet He contacted the press office of Meta, the company that controls WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, but, at the time of writing this report, he had not yet received a response.

Telma Vinha, a researcher at Unicamp who coordinates a survey on the relationship between violence in schools and social networks, told Sheet who had been informed of the presence of students from other schools in São Paulo, in addition to Dante.

“It’s violence and extremist co-optation in the palm of children and teenagers,” he said. “Meanwhile, social media regulation is stalled in Congress.”

In Dante’s statement, it is “emphatically recommended that parents ask their children to leave this WhatsApp group as soon as possible.”

The letter also states that group members will be alerted at school “about the seriousness and complications” of participating in this community. It also highlights that, as the members are minors, “responsibility for the content falls on the parents, who become co-responsible for the publication, even if they had no direct participation in the posting.”

“Hence the importance of parents monitoring and monitoring their children’s digital lives, talking to them about this subject”, says the text, signed by Elenice Ziziotti, director of human relations and coexistence, and Angela Cillo Matins, pedagogical director, who stated that the school develops educational actions in favor of digital security.

Vinha highlighted the Sheet that monitoring what your child does on social media should be seen as part of their training and protection. “If children and teenagers are consuming this content in spaces that adults are not part of, this is a collective problem, for all of us,” she said. She reinforced the need for schools to integrate students’ training in a healthy relationship with social networks into the curriculum, and not only work on this topic in a specific, isolated way.