An anonymous Twitter account named MTHS Confessions began tweeting the morning of May 13 and immediately started to draw attention of students by posting anonymous tweets about other students. Though some of the tweets contained positive messages, many were viewed as offensive and inappropriate.

The creation of the MTHS Confessions page follows the creation of a similar account directed towards Edmonds-Woodway High School students, which is no longer accessible as of Tuesday.

“I got several emails from parents and several students and teachers came in throughout the day,” Principal Greg Schwab said. “I was working with Twitter to see what we could do to have the site taken down.”

This account was asking students to send a direct message containing a confession, which was then posted anonymously. Most of the tweets however were not personal confessions, they were rumors about other students.

Some tweets that were posted contained rumors of student’s alleged sexual activity while others contained messages of blatant degradation against individual students and staff members. Many also contained positive messages of support and praise for students that were submitted via direct message.

The account was suspended briefly at one point Tuesday though within an hour was back up. It caused a significant distraction for many students as the account was posting new tweets throughout the school day.

Administrators are urging students to not participate in submitting messages to the account. Since the messages are posted anonymously, it is unclear how many students are involved in running the account.

“The person responsible is the person I’d like to address specifically, because they have caused a substantial disruption to our school day by hosting this Twitter feed,” Schwab continued.

MTHS staff members received an email late Tuesday morning directing them to speak with their 5th period classes about the account. Teachers reminded students that by participating via retweeting, favoriting or direct messaging the MTHS Confessions account could be considered cyber bullying.

“To me, when you participate in that kind of online harassment of other people, that’s just cowardly,” Schwab mentioned. “It’s easy to say stuff online, there’s no accountability for it. It’s cowardly. It’s cheap, and it’s low. I don’t know why would you want to treat another person that way just because you can, just because you can do it online, and that you can hide behind a username.”

“I’m just really disappointed,” Schwab continued.

“I’m just really frustrated by this. This is not who we are as a school.”