Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed

Description

Not funny. When a high schooler started a private Instagram that used racist and sexist memes to make his friends laugh, he thought of it as edgy humor. Over time, the edge got sharper. Then a few other kids found out about the account. Pretty soon, everyone knew.

No one in the small town of Albany, California, was safe from the repercussions of the accounts discovery. Not the girls targeted by the posts. Not the boy who created the account. Not the group of kids who followed it. Not the adults whose attempts to fix things too often made them worse. In the end, no one was laughing. And everyone was left asking: Where does accountability end for online speech that harms? And what does accountability even mean?

Author Information

Dashka Slater is the New York Timesbestselling author of The 57 Bus, which won the Stonewall Book Award and was a YALSA nonfiction finalist. Her fiction includes The Book of Fatal Errors, which was an Amazon Best Book of the Month; the picture book Escargot, which won the Wanda Gag Book Award; Baby Shoes; The Antlered Ship, which was a Junior Library Guild Selection and received four starred reviews; and Dangerously Ever After. She is also an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in Newsweek, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones. She lives in California. Visit her at dashkaslater.com.