Ricardo Martinez, an 11th grader, was in his high school lunchroom in April when a mass brawl erupted.
He watched, horrified, as a dozen teenage boys rampaged through the cafeteria, pummeling and kicking one another, overturning tables and chairs. Other students jeered and jostled to film the fight on their phones.
“It was like a stampede of videos,” said Martinez, now 18 and a senior. “Everyone was trying to get the best angle.”
But the pandemonium at Revere High School in Revere, Massachusetts, was just beginning.
Within minutes, students in other parts of the building began receiving text messages about the lunchroom brawl. Suddenly, teachers said, dozens of riled-up teenagers started racing down hallways and careening down stairways with their phones to get to the fight.
To stop more people from flooding into the cafeteria, Revere High posted staff members in front of the lunchroom entrances and issued a “hold” order to keep students in their classrooms. Administrators called police to help restore calm. The school said it ultimately suspended 17 students involved in the brawl.
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Across the United States, technology centered on cellphones — in the form of text messages, videos and social media — has increasingly fueled and sometimes intensified campus brawls, disrupting schools and derailing learning. The school fight videos then often spark new cycles of student cyberbullying, verbal aggression and violence.
A New York Times review of more than 400 fight videos from schools in California, Georgia, Texas and a dozen other states — as well as interviews with three dozen school leaders, teachers, police officers, pupils, parents and researchers — found a pattern of middle and high school students exploiting phones and social media to arrange, provoke, capture and spread footage of brutal beatings among their peers. In several cases, students later died from the injuries.
Technology has increasingly fostered and amplified every stage of this aggression. The arguments often begin with student cyberbullying — or even perceived online disrespect among friends — which prompts in-person squabbles during school, educators and police officers said. Then classmates start filming and put pressure on quarreling students to brawl. Students later share and comment on the fight clips, further humiliating the victims and sometimes triggering additional fights.
That violence has cut across some of the nation’s largest school districts, including in Los Angeles, Buffalo, New York, Jefferson County, Kentucky, and Prince George’s County, Maryland, the Times’ review found, as well as in smaller school systems.
In some cases, the violent cycle has overwhelmed the schools. Some districts now face negligence lawsuits from parents, while others are seeing an exodus of teachers. Dozens of districts have sued social media companies, saying that the platforms’ “addictive” features caused compulsive student use, disrupting learning and burdening school resources.
School administrators said they now spend a significant portion of their jobs working to thwart or untangle tech-stoked student beefs.
“Cellphones and technology are the No. 1 source of soliciting fights, advertising fights, documenting — and almost glorifying — fights by students,” said Kelly Stewart, an assistant principal at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé. “It is a huge issue.”
A gateway to chaos
Students have used social networks to plan and incite school violence since the 2000s. Over the past decade, higher-quality phone cameras and new social features, like Instagram Live and Reels, helped spur teenagers to mass-produce, stream and share videos — including school fight clips.
By 2020, dedicated fight video accounts — set up using the names or initials of middle and high schools — had popped up on Instagram and TikTok. Sometimes students staged fights among themselves and invited friends to film. Others attacked unsuspecting peers.
During the pandemic, many students became more reliant on messaging and social apps — and less comfortable with real-life interactions. Principals and teachers said some students also developed difficulties controlling their emotions, a mental health issue that psychologists call “emotional dysregulation.”
In 2021, as many districts reopened for in-person learning, some schools saw increases in student fights, aggression and cyberbullying. At Los Angeles public schools, reports of student fights more than doubled — to nearly 4,800 incidents in the 2023 school year, compared with 2,315 fights in 2018, according to a district safety report.
Student use of tech to spread school violence has led to other harms. In particular, educators and police officers said, social media influencers and TV newscasts often broadcast school fight videos, distressing students and causing further chaos.
In May, several girls planning an attack on a peer at a middle school in Novato, California, made an Instagram video beforehand discussing who would serve as a lookout or guard their backpacks during the beating, said Lt. Alan Bates, with the Novato Police Department.
Video clips of the assault, which were aired by local TV newscasts, showed several girls pummeling another as she lay on the ground, while a crowd of students hooted and filmed. Novato police later charged eight girls, ages 12 to 14, with conspiracy to commit assault. Four also faced felony assault charges.
“The aggression begins in technology, continues through the technology in the planning for the fights and comes to a head in physical confrontation,” Bates said.
Masses of students filming also endanger peers, said Chris Heagarty, the school board chair at the Wake County Public School System in Cary, North Carolina. In November 2023, he said, students recording a fight in a high school gym blocked administrators from intervening. Two boys were stabbed. One, age 15, later died.
“So many students were crowded around recording on their phones, posting to social media, trying to get the best pictures, putting themselves and others in harm’s way,” Heagarty said.
A video of the brawl, posted on social platform X in February, got more than 660,000 views.
In April, Wake County schools — the nation’s 14th-largest school district — filed a lawsuit accusing Instagram, TikTok and other platforms of negligence and interfering with school operations.
TikTok said that it forbids the promotion of violence and proactively removed content showing violent activities. Snap said it prohibited graphic violence and proactively removed accounts posting violent content.
Meta, which owns Instagram, said the platform does not allow bullying and removed content depicting physical bullying. Last month, Instagram took down 16 school fight accounts, flagged by the Times, for violating company policies.
Some families blame schools for failing to protect students and have sued their districts for negligence.
In January, Adriana Kuch’s parents sued the Central Regional School District in Bayville, New Jersey, saying the ninth grader was beaten in her high school hallway by two girls. Students posted a video of the February 2023 assault on TikTok, subjecting Kuch to intense cyberbullying. Within two days of the attack, she died by suicide “as a result of the emotional distress, humiliation and embarrassment she experienced,” according to the lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Ocean County, New Jersey.
In April, the school district filed a court document denying the allegations. The district did not return a request for comment.
Young people’s fast-changing tech habits have made it harder to prevent and contain student aggression, school officials said. Many students now use more private channels — like Snapchat, iMessage and AirDrop, Apple’s wireless file-sharing system — to set up and share fights rather than Instagram or TikTok.
“Now students might be arguing with each other, or bullying each other, for days or weeks online, which is hidden from the staff who would typically work to de-escalate the conflicts,” Christopher Bowen, the principal of Revere High, said in an email.
Many schools do not have a playbook for addressing that violence — or for helping pupils engage more positively online — in part because few researchers are studying the issue, said Desmond Upton Patton, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies social media and gang violence.
“What would it mean,” Patton said, “for a young person to understand that clowning around and filming the beating of a friend or a classmate could lead to their death?”
And while the use of text messages, social media and videos to spread violence may alarm adults, students said that it is becoming a regular part of school.
“Kids are very used to it,” said Lunna Guerrero, 16, a 10th grader at Revere High who was on the track team last year. “Kids don’t see it as something so surprising as the adults do.”
Others worried that the videos desensitized students to violence.
“The fights just immediately become entertainment,” said Endurance Nkeh, 17, a senior at Revere High. “There’s not an ounce of guilt or empathy.”
“Phones away! Stop!”
Opened in 1974, Revere High is a three-story building with a wall mosaic in the lobby celebrating pioneering men like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, a reminder of the town’s Italian American heritage. The school, just outside Boston, has for years served as an engine of upward mobility for local families, offering advanced placement courses and community college classes.
Over the last decade, enrollment has grown to 2,100 students from about 1,700, as Revere experienced an immigration boom from Central America and elsewhere. In 2018, a state accountability report on the school district noted that Revere High had “overcrowded classrooms,” “inadequate” science facilities and high chronic absenteeism.
In 2021, when the school reopened during the coronavirus, many students struggled to readjust to in-person learning. Hundreds skipped classes and roamed the school, often congregating in the gym, teachers said. In the first months of the 2021-22 school year, there were several student fights.
The problems escalated in June 2023, when a spat during lunch period blew up — a prelude to the huge cafeteria brawl nearly a year later, which led to the suspension of 17 students. Students filming and texting their friends intensified the 2023 fight, said Michelle Ervin, who teaches English as a second language.
“It was a massive amount of kids,” said Ervin, who is also the co-president of the local teachers union. “If you were in their way, you were getting pushed out of the way — or getting trampled.”
News of that brawl quickly spread, sparking false rumors — by adults — on social media that a stabbing had occurred. In a schoolwide email that day, Bowen said parental panic over the misinformation had hindered administrators and police officers from handling “a very chaotic situation.”
The mere presence of cameras, however, was enough to egg on a fight.
One video from the last school year, provided to the Times by a Revere student, opened with a female student walking down a hallway, past rows of ocher-colored school lockers, toward another girl she was preparing to fight.
A female teacher in the hallway stepped between the two girls, both of them ninth graders, and asked, “What’s going on here?” Then the educator, realizing that a fight was imminent, yelled to a colleague, “Can you call an admin please, immediately!”
Seconds later, the video showed the two girls slugging each other.
“Stop!” the teacher screamed. Then she turned to the group of students filming and yelled, “Phones away! Stop!”
Bowen said students often ignored or rejected efforts by staff to intervene, because pupils can “see the audience” of classmates filming.
“They feel a greater need to save face,” he said.
“Game of telephone”
In August, before the new school year, Bowen announced a new “phone free” learning policy requiring students to keep their cellphones off during the school day, except for lunch. But on the third day of classes, before the school had begun enforcing the new phone rules, another hallway fight erupted, this time among a group of boys.
Amid the chaos, student videos show, one boy slammed an assistant principal into lockers, sending her crumpling to the floor.
Students shared the footage with friends. Erta Ismahili, a 12th grader who chairs the Revere High student senate, said she soon heard about the incident from classmates asking her: “Have you seen the fight video?”
“It’s like a game of telephone,” said Ismahili, 18.
That afternoon, a second brawl involving more than a dozen boys, including four who had started the school hallway fight earlier that day, exploded on residential streets near the school.
David Callahan, the chief of the Revere Police Department, said students sharing news of the school fight helped spark the street brawl.
“If it wasn’t for social media and text messaging and things like cellphones in school, they probably wouldn’t have been there,” he said.
On local Facebook community groups, some adults blamed the violence on immigration, disparaging Revere students as “animals.” Several Boston news stations also aired the videos, igniting an uproar.
The Revere City Council held a meeting and proposed that the high school install metal detectors. The Revere teachers union warned that local schools were unsafe and called for more counselors to address student mental health issues.
Dianne Kelly, the Revere schools’ superintendent, said the union was spreading disinformation and exploiting the fights to help teachers bargain for a new contract.
The high school ultimately expelled 12 students.
Even so, Revere students said some adults seemed more focused on trying to contain the reputational damage than on examining the underlying causes of school violence or introducing programs to help students thrive.
Ismahili, who recently completed a career readiness program at Princeton University for low-income students, said she was also concerned by the anti-immigrant rhetoric around the fights. In public comments at the City Council meeting, she described adults’ exploitation of the fight videos as deeply damaging.
“Rather than adults being concerned for our health or our mental health or how we were feeling, I saw people calling us animals,” said Ismahili, whose parents are Albanian.
In an email, Revere Public Schools said that social media commenters had added “a layer of racism” to the fight, which had involved teenagers “of many different races and ethnicities.”
In September, Revere High hired an additional school police officer, bringing the total to two. And teachers began enforcing the classroom cellphone ban.
The fights have subsided — at least for now.
• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
