It seems that a fourteen year old Dutch girl was a few weeks off to debut her April Fool’s Day joke, because on April 13, a tweet was sent to @AmericanAir, American Airline’s twitter, that said “hello my name is Ibrahim and I am from Afghanistan. I’m part of Al Qaeda and on June 1st I’m going to do something really big bye”.
Do I even need to point out all the awful things about this prank? First off, it’s not funny in the slightest, and there’s something wrong with you if you think it is. This half-baked idea is a perfect example of teenagers with out of proportion nothing-can-hurt-me complexes.
Even though more people than there should have been thought this was a “harmless” joke, American Airlines took it as a serious threat, and this girl, going by the twitter handle @QueenDemetriax, has been placed under arrest. The airline responded swiftly and professionally, warning her that her account info and IP address -which can be tracked back to the very device she used to send the tweet- had been recorded and the authorities were involved.
@QueenDemetriax flipped flopped from being scared about the FBI finding her, to being overjoyed by the amount of attention she was getting and back again. In the end, I don’t think gaining 30k followers would counter balances being arrested.
This story has been gaining a lot of steam, and many people think it was taken too far by placing a fourteen-year-old girl under arrest. But a lot of teens aren’t picking up on the seriousness of the issue, and have started tweeting copies and variations of the same “prank” to American Airlines and other airlines as well.
Maybe it is too extreme, but the biggest dilemma of the millennials is that they don’t understand consequences. I personally know plenty of people who go online and harass internet communities, just because they think it’s funny and they think that they can’t be caught. @QueenDemetriax has been made into an example. She bears the scarlet letter that this generation needs to see.
People, and teens especially, need to learn that an electronic footprint will follow them everywhere. It doesn’t only include pictures of you partying it up, it includes comments, post, status updates, and even IMs and private messages can make themselves public in one click. The Internet can be a dangerous place that, as a matter of fact, does have consequences in the real world.
