Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.
No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.
I’m glad this person’s life was semi-ruined by using big tech.
I am tired of normies using horrible platforms and then acting Pikachu-level shocked when they have horrible privacy violations.
Tech illiteracy + Big tech exploiting tech illiteracy = profit and constant surveilance
and normies are too damn stupid to get it, and every once in a while one of them gets fucked, and then… suddenly… nothing changes yet again
and these normies with their acceptance of any TOS, even the shittiest of shit, and making opting out some sort of social misstep, like “What?! You really don’t use WhatsApp?” with an ugly look, means I am glad these assholes occasionally suffer for their ignorance
What a fucking ghoul.
I’ve been slowly dragging my family kicking and screaming away from surveillance state shenanigans but it’s hard.
It really is. I get the sentiment that there can be schadenfreude.
It’s a terrible thing that’s happened, but fuck gadgetreview for that shitty misleading clickbait headline.
Editor knew they wouldn’t get the same impact with “teacher posted in a group chat that they were going to shoot a student”, so “group” becomes “private” and the detail about the threat gets moved way down into the article body. This is a journal who clearly wants to tell you what to think.
A group chat between 4 people should be just as private of a chat than between two people. Private isn’t a quantity, you can have a private chat with 100 people if you wanted. However clearly none of its actually private.
deleted by creator
Time to tell everyone to uninstall their apps… Oh, wait. We already did that.
And in any other country that may have been correctly classed as a joke, but in the US it ain’t a joke. What a dystopia
dont threaten violence in a school setting online. you are guaranteed to face consequences
Might have been a joke
We are talking about the USA, I fucking hope they do not take school shooting threats as jokes!
How do you differentiate between a threat and a joke?
maybe so. but the way trumps just ice department is run, they have no sense of humor
The amount of people in this thread that seem to think invasion of privacy is cool to police thought crime is honestly shocking. The subject and subject matter are completely irrelevant.
In addition, teachers are fucking people and venting and joking in private with close friends is sacrosanct.
My guess is most are very young. Goes to show our civil liberties worldwide, especially since 9/11, have eroded tremendously. Young people have grown up in a world where privacy is a joke and government spying is a foregone conclusion.
I work mostly with people older than myself. The younger ones are shocked by everyone’s lackadaisical privacy practices. The older ones all say, “oh well, it’s everywhere and I have nothing to hide. It’s not like you can get away from it.”
I don’t know a single young person who actually cares about Internet privacy. The vast majority of them are on social media all the time.
I realized this because we have a younger engineer who didn’t even have an Adblock running on their browser. When I asked them about it, they just told me that they grew up seeing ads so it doesn’t matter to them 🤯
Damn, it really sucks how normalized internet brainrot is becoming.
I believe there are a few things you simply shouldn’t joke about. Killing children is one of those things. But yes, everybody has a fundamental right to their privacy and it’s insane that mass surveillance is becoming more and more common and way too many people seem to just accept or ignore it.
You SHOULD be able to joke about ANYTHING. Who decides what things are permisible? Whoever yoy give the power to do so will then use it arbitrarily to only allow the speech that supports them — that’s how fascism is built, in fact.
Yes, we agree. You should be able to. No one should face legal action until an actual crime has been commited and joking isn’t a crime. But that doesn’t mean doing so is good. I did not say there are things you shouldn’t be able to joke about, just that there are a few topics so serious and tragic that joking about them is bad.
I believe there are a few things you simply shouldn’t joke about. Killing children is one of those things.
I don’t think we could be friends. Not because I have a need to make jokes about killing kids, but because I don’t want to spend the whole time worrying about how you’ll take a joke.
Do you think the same about peoples pronouns?
That’s fine. I think we’d get along fine if you don’t make a habit of joking about killing kids, slavery, rape or animal abuse. If you think that makes me too sensitive then I’m happy to stay away.
I believe there are a few things you simply shouldn’t joke about
And I believe that belief makes you a dangerous idiot who’ll happily support Fascism.
Me thinking that joking about killing kids isn’t ok makes me a fascist? I don’t quite understand how you got to that conclusion, but ok.
To be clear, I didn’t say people can’t say what they want to. I think that freedom of speech is incredibly important. It’s none of my business what you choose to say if I’m not involved, but I would not be comfortable joking around with such a serious topic. If you are, then more power to you I guess?
The relevant part of my reply was about mass surveillance being bad, and I don’t think that’s a very hot take. What I think about certain dark joke topics doesn’t matter.
Any restriction on your freedom to say offensive shit must be fascism, right?
Couldn’t you just fuck-off into the woods and enjoy all your freedoms alone?
Any restriction on your freedom to say offensive shit must be fascism, right?
Not what I said. But any restriction that leads to law enforcement intervention without a person complaining damn sure is.
Couldn’t you just fuck-off into the woods and enjoy all your freedoms alone?
No, and fuck you for asking. If I have to share the planet with a bunch of copsucking shitbags who believe in thoughtcrime for dead baby jokes but people saying the most horrifically racist, sexist, or homophobic bullshit is just the price of free speech, you can suck it up and deal with there being people out there who can tell the difference between “popular” and “right”.
Dark humour is half of what keeps people going in Jobs where the situation is dire. You have to let it out somehow, if you just let it bottle up you’ll explode and won’t be able to do the job anymore.
The idea that mass violence, which happens very rarely all things considered, justifies constant mass surveillance and automated reaction is very troubling. The new “think of the children,” I suppose.
Mass violence that the US as a society endorses by doing nothing to address the root causes of gun access and lack of mental health treatments.
It’s as if they can create the conditions for mass repression and then justify any action.
Ironically the far-right was worried about this 40+ years ago with the “FEMA Camps” narrative - right up until ICE started rounding up citizens and US residents alike in the exact facial fashion described
I am dripping in the irony
In fact, we also have countries with less surveillance and less mass violence. And that’s most countries these days. There’s been only one single school shooting ever in my country and I actually knew people at that school at the time (my ex had graduated from there, but her cousin was still attending). 8th or 9th grade boy with a strict military father was being bullied by a teacher so he shot the teacher. That teacher would give him bad grades knowing his father would punish him for it (someone said he’d have to run 20 km home from school if he got a bad grade, but I’m not sure if that’s true), mocked him apparently, etc. Not trying to justify the kid’s actions, just illustrating what it took to get someone in a country other than the US to even go that far. He didn’t announce his plans to his friends beforehand AFAIK, so surveillance wouldn’t even have caught it.
Very disturbing, it was the last straw to switch my chats (besides family) to Signal.
I had held onto Telegram for years because of their fun animated stickers, but yesterday discovered that Signal has those too, actually all sets from Telegram are available on unofficial Signal sticker sites, so now I’m all sorted 😅
The animated stickers on signal are trash in comparison and there are only a fraction as many, like 120 or so in total if I just counted correctly.
did you try these? https://signalstickers.org/?s=author%3ATelegram+animated%3Atrue
For anyone that doesn’t know this yet, Telegram isn’t secure - your messages are decrypted in the middle, on their servers. It’s a shame they’ve got such a fun app otherwise
Funny that I have it the other way around. My entire fam on Signal and few (only close) friends on here
my family still uses Facebook Messenger, it’s only the tech savvier people I hung out with on Telegram that I managed to switch to Signal 😮💨
So the lesson to the rest of us is DO NOT USE SNAPCHAT especially for private messaging.
I use Signal, was pressed to do so by privacy-minded friends and have pressed other friends to adopt the client.
So long as you don’t accidentally include Jeffrey Goldberg in your chat, you’re okay.
Wrong lesson. All the ways to track you combined don’t leave you an outlet.
Signal is fine to make you feel better.
It’s a social problem that should be solved by social, not technical, means. Awareness, law, burning tires.
EDIT: for moral clarity’s sake - I live in Russia, I’m not spreading awareness mostly, I’m not trying to change any law and sure as hell I’m not burning tires ; but if you live in a democratic country with courts and presumption of innocence until proven guilty yadda-yadda, you might try those
I live in the United States. Crime is not about behavior or adherence to law, but who we are. Those of us who cannot afford lawyers will be framed by law enforcement or coerced into confession, or extorted into a plea deal.
And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.
So we’re not a liberal, democratic society with rule of law.
In your society you can openly protest against people calling the shots, or be rude to cops, and not expect legal (and physical) retribution. There are places where this is unthinkable.
And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.
Yes, that’s because the public has ideologies and corporate interests, and no common idea of what it means “to serve the public”.
Delta Chat is better than Signal imo.
Why?
but if you live in a democratic country with courts and presumption of innocence until proven guilty yadda-yadda,
So not Murica.
Compared to Russia it is, but there’s a lower threshold to start having rights, expressed in money you have to spend on lawyers.
In case of Russia no amount of money is enough to make it democratic and lawful even in some separate, specific, one can even say - personal, situation.
It’s the fallacy of “if it’s bad here, that means that other bad place is similarly bad”, no, that other bad place is an order of magnitude worse, but you are refusing to accept that due to lack of experience. And there’s “worse” someplace else. In many other places, actually.
Are there any good countries at this point?
India
I could copy so many more, but here’s a taste of justice in India
Oh yeah. It’s dogshit if you’re an SC/ST in the rural parts. But it’s nice for the rest.
Man that was a stupid thing to joke about on a service like Snapchat
That’s a stupid thing to say about a child in any context on any platform. Even in jest, keep that shit tucked away in your head.
Yeah can’t wait until you say something in frustration and get hauled away for it. People supporting this bullshit are the only people who deserve to have it happen to them, and as long as we’re going down the fascism hellslide anyway I’m gonna take some satisfaction in seeing the people who supported the Leopards come to the horrific realization about exactly whose faces were on the menu.
I’m in support of making sure my kids are safe. When someone says something like this, even in frustration, I don’t know if they intend to act on it. I’d rather everyone be safe.
It was absolutely stupid of this teacher to fuck up like this.
But I’d rather the police show up and check on her than have yet another school of bloodied, dead kids.
But you do you.
Fuck off. Like you’ve never said you want to throttle someone without ever actually wanting to.
I have not. That’s just fucking weird. And violent. And that is NOT what was said here. So don’t move the goal post. The teacher specifically said “shoot”. Who the fuck even jokes about shooting someone!? That’s sick.
I’d rather everyone be safe.
Everyone except anyone who’s made a joke you personally find distasteful, apparently.
When the thought police come for you, I hope no one lifts a finger.
Jokes are funny.
This, wasn’t a joke. Maybe it was frustration. But it wasn’t a joke.
Funny is subjective.
This was a joke, and so is your bullshit attempt to justify punishing thoughtcrime.
Only thing less “funny” than this “joke” is the fact that people like you think it’s okay.
There is NO context in which this would be “funny”.
Questions for the ridiculous number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up their right to privacy because you believe it makes schools and other places safer:
Have you read the 50+ page user agreement for your cell phone company? How about the user agreements of every app that has access to your cell phone, your PC mic or apps that have access to your files? Late model cars have microphones too, as do TV remotes. Microsoft has access to everything on your Windows PC. I’d give 100 to 1 odds that 99% of you haven’t read any of those user agreements OR the UA for private chat apps you are using. Likewise are you sure any cloud storage you’re using isn’t scanning your documents for forbidden phrases?
Since you haven’t read every word of each and every user agreement and think it keeps schools safe, you should be just fine with the fact that EVERYTHING you say or write may be available to law enforcement, even if you’re talking to yourself while sitting on the toilet in your home. If you mutter that you’d like to kill someone or burn something misheard as a school building to the ground you are just fine with AI flagging it and the police knocking on your door in an hour, right? You’ll also be just fine with losing your career and your job never being able to find another one, right? Right? After all, other people never know WTF someone dangerous and violent is going to do.
The number of people on here who are perfectly willing to give up all their rights and have their private communications monitored for something that is nothing more than security theater is unbelievable.
Real US judges have ruled that click-wrapped ToSes are not legally binding, since they commonly are bypassed, and app developers use dark patterns to discourage end users from reading them.
Also, ToSes and EULAs are notoriously verbose and difficult to read. People with college level reading skills struggle with them.
So no, blaming the end user is not appropriate here.
People with college level reading skills struggle with them.
That’s a bigger deal than you may think it is, given that US college students are testing dumber and dumber every year, and is accelerating thanks to AI.
Now that you know everything on Snapchat is going through active automated filtering, consider what Snapchat has chosen NOT to flag and is allowing to flow freely, like sex trafficking and the sale of minors.
As unfair and life-changing as this event has been for this young teacher, I think the actual story of what Snapchat (and every other digital communication method) is reading/tracking yet allowing is a much, much bigger story. And dirtier. With billionaires and pedophiles and all manner of nasty allowables we do not yet know.
Is it legal for a service to be called private when it is programmatically shared with law enforcement?
Isn’t it interfering with murican’s 4th amendment or something?
I♡ANAL
The formatting on your post doesn’t appear correctly. If you are using an app to access Lemmy, it likely its own mark down that doesn’t work outside of that app.
Supertext: ^Super^textSupertext: SupertextSubtext: ~Sub~textSubtext: SubtextI used the HTML-like version, is there a de facto fediverse standard?
'Cos both the web client and jerboa render it fine.I know that the apps are all over the place for formatting, butI had thought that all of Lemmy used the same markdown. If you are using the standard webclient, then guess that isn’t the case.
No that was on the android client, on the web client i see the markdown too.
Edited the original
The headline of this article should have mentioned the reason her communication was flagged was because she mentioned shooting the student or the school. When you send a text, or Snapchat message, you are stripping out a wide range of non-verbal communication including intent and seriousness. So when someone sends a message with the comment that they might shoot a student or the school there is no way to judge these things. The last thing Snapchat wants or needs is an actual school shooting occurring that can be traced back to the shooter actually mentioning their intent to do so on their platform. With no way to judge intent Snapchat had to have a way to address these concerns. If an actual shooting was prevented then Snapchat would be lauded. Otherwise it’s spun like this article implying it’s a breach of privacy.
The world with social media is much different than the world before it. It’s changed the way people think, the types of things they think about and what they consider important. It therefore changes the way they act. Combine this with the ever growing surveillance state that intentionally wants to manipulate us and is able to do so at scale and speed and we find ourselves in the giant and dangerous mess we’re in now.
Except Snapchat doesn’t have to surveil its customers and we really don’t want it to.
Does Apple surveil iMessages? Does your cell carrier need to monitor your text messages? Does it listen to your calls to see if you make terroristic threats?
Some bad things might be prevented if we “listened in” to all communications and then triggered a police response when something alarming was said. But doing so is ripe for abuse by those in power as well and that’s why warrants are required before surveillance and the invasion of your privacy is allowed. No warrant was necessary here because Snapchat makes you accept the surveillance under its terms of use, which all apps and cell carriers could technically do. And your Amazon Alexas. We don’t want that. Without privacy you don’t have freedom.
It IS a breach of privacy.
Few people who use these apps expect to be surveiled. That may make them ignorant, but that doesn’t change that this is a breach of their privacy.
People really need to quit acting like there’s an expectation of privacy on what is essentially someone else’s land. You’re perfectly free to fedpost on your own damn service, but don’t expect companies to be okay with you making the same kinds of “jokes” that hundreds of kids that went to commit mass shootings did. This isn’t 2000, there are consequences to this kind of action.
Yeah no, this is trying to justify a surveillance-state.
The only reason Snapchat would give two shits is fear of lawsuits.I’m not sure it’s fear of lawsuits. We don’t sue cell carriers for not monitoring text messages, and even if we did Snapchat’s pockets are deep.
Snapchat isn’t afraid of being sued… they’re selling your data and may also assist the government identify “Anti-fa” agents.
This warrantless mass surveillance technology chain can also easily be used to silence dissent, chill speech, and oppress by race, religion, gender, sexuality, pregnancy status, and any other status so deemed problematic by those with state power. This is not a power delegated to the government by the constitution, and it was not built to protect the people.
We accept impositions on our liberty for the protection of the general welfare. Did this actually protect us?
This is why privacy, no access encryption services, VPNs, etc, are becoming so popular. Not because anyone is planning to do anything illegal, but because we don’t trust the people spying on us not to show up at your door. It’s already happening, it wasn’t dramatic or unrealistic like everyone says, even just this article proves it. You should be able to exist freely, without someone over-analysing every text.
I know right. The kinda events that they said this was to protect from rarely occur. When you look back they spruiked the word terror and extremist, over and over to get acceptance and now…well now almost everyone fits in that category if your language or moderate actions are not in flavour.
Marvel at how AI stopped this non-existent threat, while also giving advice on the best way to kill yourself, or get the highest kill score in a mass shooting, or hack into other corporations.
Sure, this tech isn’t ever going to start directly killing people it has determined are a problem, flipping off life support machines, crashing autonomous vehicles, etc.
