Fake Facebook Suicide Gets Teen Suspended From School

 By 
Kate Freeman
 on 
Fake Facebook Suicide Gets Teen Suspended From School
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There's just one problem: this is all fake.

The story was fabricated by a high school student who said she created the Facebook page and video for a class project asking students to highlight an important issue. The project resulted in 15-year-old Jessica Barba being suspended from school for five days.

A concerned parent saw the Facebook page after Barba posted a message pretending to be the made-up 12-year-old saying, "I wanna be dead." The police contacted the school and the teen was brought to the assistant principal's office. Barba said she included a disclaimer on the Facebook page and video, but when school officials confronted her with printouts of the pages, they did not include the disclaimers, she told Matt Lauer on TODAY.

The teen's mother tried to show school officials that the pages included disclaimers, but that didn't get Barba out of trouble.

Here's the video Barba released:

There have been numerous stories of people creating fake Facebook pages to impersonate, bully or humiliate others, and in these cases all involved ended up in legal trouble. Barba says she was coming from a good place when she created this project to bring attention to the issue of bullying.

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