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.
Yes, we absolutely fucking are.
You know who we’re not supposed to feel any empathy at all for?
People dense enough to not understand the difference between a joke a frustrated person made in the moment to intimate friends vs a scripted joke a comedian tells on stage or on TV, and how different those things are in relation to “normalizing” anything.
Maybe if the US removed their “shooting kids” problem it would be acceptable but it seems like a culpable threat to me, doesn’t matter if she said it was a joke after the fact
Cool, I hope the thought police come for you someday.
Me too 🙂