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.
My gawd. People are missing the issue here. You described it pretty well OP.
Yes there are weirdos and they must be caught. Algorithms are getting out of hand though, targeting their wrong people and not the weirdos. There is a massive privacy issue here. Must every text that we send be accessible by the government? I don’t buy the argument of “I have nothing to hide”. When you are in the hot seat they will use any info they can get their hands on. make an offside joke they will use it.
Fuck this shit.
Even people who have “nothing to hide” aren’t safe.
I’ve lost track of the number of articles about people who were wrongly accused by “AI” camera systems or flagged for arrest because their (relatively common-seeming) name matches or is close to an entirely different person who is a legitimate suspect. Some of those people have been jailed for weeks and have lost their jobs over what amounts to a clerical error.