One suspension, four students, and an AI image nobody in the chain could delete

Follow where the image traveled and the reporting route fails differently at every stop. The TikTok post was public and attached to a real name: the account that shared it used the student's own name in its profile, and DeSantiago recognized him from the middle school where he regularly filled in ^[5]. That is the only version of this a report form is built for, and even then he found it himself, by typing his own name into TikTok search on the evening he reported the incident, which is how he discovered a second student had built an account impersonating him with his name slightly misspelled ^[7]. Snapchat he heard about secondhand, after the fact ^[9]. The classroom copy arrived by AirDrop and was revoked before he could do anything with it ^[11]. Snap's policies do prohibit sharing AI-generated or manipulated content to humiliate or sexually harass someone, and a company spokesperson says there are established processes for reporting it ^[14], but each of those processes presumes a victim holding a link.

He had assumed at the start that TikTok's guidelines would clear inappropriate photos quickly ^[3]. What the reporting shows instead is a teacher doing the platform's discovery work and the school's investigative work at the same time: his suspect list came from follower overlap and his own knowledge of which students were friends ^[6].

The arithmetic is worth stating plainly. Students named or suspected in his account: the one who admitted making the image, the two he inferred from the sharing account's network, the one behind the impersonation profile. Four. Recorded consequences: one in-school suspension ^[16].

The law is not the missing piece. Fake nude images of nonconsenting adults can amount to cyberstalking and fall under the federal Take It Down Act, which covers computer-generated depictions ^[13]. But in most of the cases WIRED gathered, the teachers never reported the content to the platforms carrying it ^[15], and a school disciplinary file is not a deletion request. DeSantiago spent weeks with administrators, the students' parents and the police ^[19], after an assistant principal told him the school would take care of it ^[18]. He warned the principal in writing that students unafraid to generate and post images of him were likely circulating material privately in texts and group chats, and that other students could be in it ^[22].

What the high school offered him was an immediate investigation and the school counselor ^[20]. He stopped taking middle school assignments until the matter was fully addressed ^[10], and says he probably will not return to the district this year because he does not feel safe ^[21]. The district did not respond to WIRED's request for comment [c10b]. By his account, the image kept spreading ^[9].