Words are powerful, and we are a generation that easily misuses this power.

Websites such as Facebook and Twitter, which were intended to bring people together and to share ideas, were captured by teens and drastically altered.

A group of seven anonymous students were some of the many to misunderstand what these websites are for and use them for destructive purposes.

On Aug. 12, this group created a Facebook account, registered under the name “Lawrence HS Halls,” to share the riveting gossip of Lawrence High School.

“Loving is hard, hating is easy,” is the first thing that greeted visitors to the page and otherwise encouraged hateful behavior.

In the information bar, the group pledges they are “a group of friends that has this page to post all of LHS’s latest gossip going around the halls. If something is going on, it’ll be soon posted on here so you don’t have to waste your time going around trying to find everything out.”

The “profile picture” is a picture of Chesty Lion. This picture does not just represent the people who started the page but the rest of the people associated with Lawrence High, past, present and future.

In its first few weeks, the page housed inappropriate pictures that seemed to be copied and pasted from Google searches. The pictures had nothing to do with LHS and were disgusting. There was no information about the first weeks of classes or Lawrence High in general posted on the page.

After seeing these pictures, students attacked the page with hateful comments of their own.

Junior Chelsea Sinay is a Facebook friend of Lawrence HS Halls and was one of the few to post on the wall defending the group’s right to free speech.

“Well, I saw the gross pictures and everyone was hating on it, and I was just like … you guys shouldn’t be putting that much hatred on someone for wanting to have fun on a page,” Sinay said.

She posted to the people who were commenting on the page that fighting hate with hate wouldn’t get anybody anywhere.

“I [commented] that the pictures were absolutely disgusting, and I told them that just commenting and being jerks about it was just a waste of everybody’s time,” Sinay said.

Facebook is a public site and because of the First Amendment, people have the right to express themselves through it. But what you can do and what you should do are two very different issues.

Partly, the blame should be put on the media.

Our generation has grown up watching shows like “Gossip Girl” and “Pretty Little Liars” — shows that encourage gossip, hateful behavior and secrets. Many teenagers see the glamorous lives the characters lead and want to simulate the drama and excitement in their own lives.

People may not realize that those kinds of lives are not realistic and spreading gossip can create more problems, drama and backlash.

The Lawrence HS Halls group stated that they “will post anything that [they] think is true.” However, how will they know if something is true? They would just be spreading rumors and gossip.

The way they present themselves also makes it seem as though they are aimed at only presenting the bad, or most dramatic, information.

Is this really how we want our school represented to everyone else? LHS is not a bad school, but having a Facebook page dedicated to its drama and mishaps doesn’t draw the right attention.

We, the population of LHS, and especially the creators of this page, need to remember that this page can potentially be seen by the rest of the world, and this means judged as well. How LHS should be judged needs to be considered.

The creators of this page, and anyone else doing something similar on a social network, need to be careful to utilize their free speech rights correctly. If someone posts something that is untrue, it is libel. Free speech does not include posting lies that hurt reputations.

Recently, Lawrence HS Halls has been unfindable on Facebook. But, this page isn’t the only problem on social media sites. Students need to remember everything they post on the internet is permanent, and if they make the mistake of posting something untrue or hurtful they could cause more problems than spreading fun drama. We have the power to preach to the masses, and we need to use it for good, not evil.