Single mother says she was fired from her job after her co-worker reported her TikTok to school officials

Nicole Johnson(@nicoleybridget3)TikTok Nicole Johnson said she was fired after a co-worker reported a TikTok video she posted to her boss. Johnson joked on TikTok that she couldn’t arrive to work early due to her kids but still stopped for Starbucks. Administrators also interpreted the commonly-used hashtag “FYP” as “F you people” instead of “For You Page.

” A single mother said in a recent series of TikTok videos that she was fired from her job in May as a teacher after her co-worker reported one of her videos as inappropriate to the school’s administration.  Nicole Johnson, 29, who was working as a special education paraprofessional, said in a recent video that a co-worker “turned in” one of her TikTok videos to the school administration to get her fired knowing she was on a “thin line. ” The video that was reported, posted on May 14, depicted Johnson drinking from a Starbucks cup with the caption, “Me telling my coworkers there is no way I can come in early cause I have kids, but yet I arrive with a Starbucks daily.

“”I put this TikTok out there didn’t like think anyone was gonna do anything with it, I didn’t think I could get fired because I didn’t think it was unprofessional, it doesn’t swear, it’s not negative, it not harassing, it literally just me being like “I can’t come into work early, but I have a Starbucks, ” Johnson said in an August 11 TikTok.  The May video has garnered over 165,000 views as of Tuesday.  Johnson did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

She also did not name her employer.  The series of events, which led to Johnson being fired, began in November 2021. In a video posted this past week on TikTok, Johnson said that she was put on administrative leave for three weeks last November for uploading “unprofessional TikToks” and “harassment of a co-worker.

“According to Johnson, the “unprofessional TikToks” she posted in November were intended to share her niece’s story, who had a traumatic brain injury. She said she then was emailed by administrators when she came back from administrative leave in December regarding her late attendance, which she expressed were caused by her struggles with ADHD and being a single mother. She said she then asked for accommodations.

 However, in May, after posting the video about her Starbucks, Johnson said she was called into a meeting to discuss her social media posts. She claimed in her videos that human resources employee printed out four colored copies of someone taking a photo of the TikTok video, which she revealed to be what got her fired.  “They whipped out this full-colored picture of someone taking a picture of someone’s phone cause we can’t screenshot apparently, and I could tell who was doing the pictures and whose phone, and all that, like I knew who it was instantly,” Johnson explained.

Johnson continued by saying that the administration that fired her perceived the video as a “slap in the face” by interpreting the hashtag #FYP as “F you people” instead of  “For You Page. “”I look at them, and I was like, “that’s for your page,” she said. “and I tried to explain it to them, but their all like, they’re not on TikTok, and so they tried to end it with “well it also means F you people.

“In a follow-up video, Johnson explains the reason why she posted the original video, saying her job sometimes asked her to come in early and she saw a Tiktok video from other users about the same issue and decided to re-create it.  Johnson continued the video by saying she made the original TikTok private after two days, something she said she normally does. But it was too late.

“I’ll never get to say goodbye to the students, though, they’ll think I just left them,” Johnson said on TikTok.  Read the original article on Insider.