Viral memes fuel hysteria over school fight clubs

School WhatsApp groups have been flooded with messages from anxious parents rushing to protect their children, after viral social media posts threatened mass brawls between named schools across the country.

The AI-generated memes, featuring images of men in balaclavas, set dates for fights between pupils from years nine to 11, promising to award points for different levels of violence and encouraging the use of weapons including compasses.

Police officers, teachers, local authorities and a government minister have all reacted to the supposed threat. None has made clear to worried parents, however, that so far there have been zero confirmed incidents of violence linked to the posts.

The “red v blue” or “school wars” trend began around 11 February in London and has since spread to Bristol, Birmingham and Northampton. Letters have been sent to millions of parents, including those with children at primary schools.

The concern has been at its most acute in the capital, but nowhere in the many written warnings shared by the Met police over the past two weeks has it confirmed whether a single instance of large-scale violence between schools has been detected. The Observer understands there has been no violence in the capital with a known link to the trend.

In a letter to all secondary schools in Brent, north-west London, Det Supt Tony Bellis said the force was aware of posts encouraging violence between students and there would be a “heightened police presence”. He said officers were monitoring online activity and working with social media platforms to take down accounts encouraging violence.

Nurses in Homerton, east London, have been warned to look out for injuries that might be linked to the trend and Liz Kendall, the technology minister, said the content is “deeply concerning”, adding that she understood that TikTok executives are taking "action to review and address it”.

Faron Paul, a knife crime campaigner from Tottenham, north London, said he had been contacted by concerned parents and schoolchildren but that he was unaware of any actual violence. “Someone sat down with AI apps, school names and areas and they just had the idea for this, and it's been circulated and perpetuated through social media,” he said. Sayce Holmes-Lewis, a youth worker who runs the Mentivity charity in Southwark, south London, said that social media companies were profiting from the hysteria and there were still concerns that the memes could eventually lead to real-world violence.

“This obviously sensationalises the situation and brings more traffic and more profits,” he said.

“They’re not doing enough [to shut down accounts sharing these sorts of posts]... We have to hold them to account because they are helping fuel the fire in the situation today.”

Photograph by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images