Teen Boys Are Using Meta Glasses to Harass and Bully Girls at High Schools and Middle Schools

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Teen Boys Are Using Meta Glasses to Harass and Bully Girls at High Schools and Middle Schools

"I'm about to break those glasses."

By Maggie Harrison Dupré

Published

Aug 19, 2026 10:04 AM EDT

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A TikTok video shows a teenage girl walking through the front doors of a large high school. It’s filmed point-of-view style using smart glasses, and a hashtag in the caption reads "#metaglasses."

"Excuse me, could I get your Roblox?" the adolescent boy wearing the head-mounted camera badgers the girl.

"No," she responds, glaring unhappily as she quickly moves past him. She keeps walking, but the boy filming follows her.

"Come back! Pleasepleaseplease!" he wheedles as the girl continues to walk away. "Your LinkedIn, at least? Your LinkedIn, please? Your Reddit? Come on, your Reddit? I know you have a Reddit!"

The girl, clearly uncomfortable with the unwanted attention, doesn’t turn around.

The video has the distinctive style of the invasive "rizzcam" and other "POV" videos in which self-styled "pickup artists" and other online creators use smart glasses to record themselves harassing women at malls and boardwalks or pestering employees at their place of work for content. But the people in this video aren’t adults. Everyone in the clip — the girl, the boy filming, and hallway passersby — is a teenage student.

A Futurism review found large numbers of videos recorded at middle and high schools using smart glasses — almost always Meta’s AI Glasses, designed in partnership with the eyewear titan Ray-Ban — and shared to social media platforms TikTok and Instagram. Recordings take place in school hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms, and feature interactions with other students as well as with staff and faculty.

Much of the behavior on display is plainly harassment and bullying, often filmed without the subjects’ knowledge or consent and uploaded online to humiliate them further. Strikingly, every single one of the many smart glasses videos we found were captured by teen boys — and their bad behavior was overwhelmingly directed at girls.

In some clips, neither the boys’ classmates nor teachers appear to realize they’re being recorded. In others, they do — and express frustration and distress, making it clear that they don’t want to be in the video. (We’re not linking directly to any of this content due to concern for the privacy of the many minors who appear in the footage.)

In one video, a student even filmed himself dropping his smartphone into one of the pouches that schools use to confiscate phones during class — suggesting that smart glasses are being used by students in spaces where teachers are seeking to limit electronic devices.

Other students kept recording as teachers caught them filming in the classroom, in interactions they’ve also posted online.

"These are way more discreet than I thought they would be," one teacher who caught a teenage boy filming remarked as he turned over the AI-infused glasses in his hand.

Many of the posts shared by students are vlog-style "Come With Me" or "Day in My Life" videos. Kids film themselves arriving at school, walking around with their friends, and sitting in the cafeteria or in class.

In other videos, students record themselves interacting with staff like teachers, aides, and security personnel. Though some of these adults realize they’re being filmed, most don’t appear to have a clue. Many of these encounters are relatively benign: one student recorded himself telling a teacher a ChatGPT-generated joke, for example, and another shows banter with a security guard.

But kids are also using Meta glasses to record and post videos of themselves or other students arguing with their teachers. "Teacher gets mad!!!" reads the caption of one video in which a teen filmed another student in an argument with a teacher about grades. In another clip, a student records himself quarreling with a teacher asking him to take out his notes.

It’s clear that some teenage boys are taking cues from viral pickup artists and online pranksters who have abused Meta glasses to record themselves harassing unsuspecting women in public or badgering employees at their place of work. These young smart glasses users are copying those tactics and deploying them against other teens at their schools, and the overwhelming majority of this harassment has been directed at teen girls....