The battle of the poms

A Pennsylvania mum has been charged with multiple counts of harassment after reportedly using deepfake technology to oust her daughter’s cheerleading rivals.

In a current-day reimagining of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the dancefloor music video – a harrowing account of an erstwhile Blue Peter presenter’s own spawn cheating her way to church hall dance-off glory with poison and butter – Raffaela Spone is alleged to have turned to artificial intelligence and text messaging to set about sabotaging and terrorising the Victory Vipers cheerleading team.

While many mothers’ engagement with social media merely entails the dissemination of mawkish memes and Cockapoo kidnapping updates, it appears this one browsed her targets’ online profiles and doctored their photos to make it look like they’d been boozing, smoking and sharing nudes.

As if that wasn’t enough violence for Spone, a phone number that had been sending the cheerleaders abusive text messages has been traced to her IP address.

The Vipers’ team coaches, Mark McTague and Kelly Cramer, no doubt a million miles out of their human pyramid-shaped comfort zone, said: “When this incident came to our attention last year we immediately initiated our own internal investigation and took the appropriate action.”

As for the cheerleaders, they can finally get back to their routines, safe in the knowledge that any actual evidence of their nights on the lash will from now on be dismissed out of hand.