What started out as a light-hearted joke, meant purely for good-natured yet sarcastic fun, quickly escalated into hurtful and offensive criticism.

This is a danger of social media, with cyber-bullying on the rise. How far is too far?

Jett the Leopard is well known as our true-life leopard mascot. Jett the Leopard also has a Twitter account; created by an anonymous student that roams the halls today.

Jett posts jokes related to school issues, such as homecoming, dress codes and randomly replies with witty comebacks to random students’ tweets.

Many students enjoy reading the anonymous tweets, because most of what he says is agreed with by the popular opinion.

However, when Jett the Leopard singled out junior Heloise Rytzell, telling her that her life couldn’t be bad because of her popularity and looks, everyone following Jett at the time fired tweets against him, heating up the Twitter timeline.

“Well I was just kind of upset with my parents and so I posted a few things on Twitter, just because my friend’s follow me, and I didn’t expect anyone to get offended or anything,” Rytzell said.

What happened next was more than Rytzell expected.

“Well, I don’t think he was offended, but he tweeted back at me and at first I was offended myself… he said something like ‘Honest to god I can promise your life isn’t that bad,’ or something like that,” Rytzell said.  “Then the whole school like backfired, I’m sure he was kind of offended. But if you’re going to hide behind a computer screen and fire at someone, you should at least tell them who you are.”

With everyone rushing to defend Rytzell, the question of Jett the Leopard’s identity was a trending topic. The anonymous Leopard didn’t give in and his identity is still known to only a select few.

Part of the lure of this account is the mystery following him. Some prefer not to know who this leopard is.

“I think that whoever is behind Jett the Leopard should stay anonymous because it’s more fun that way, and it’s a fun thing as long as it doesn’t go too far,” junior Abby Hughey said.