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.
This person was subject to a whole FBI/local law enforcement team showing up to their place of work, questioning, arresting, and holding them overnight. They not only no longer have a job (you clearly didn’t read the article), but they also will likely not be able to enter the profession they spent 4 years in college to get into.
The closed laptop erased her lesson plan. I don’t know if you know this but teachers don’t get paid for overtime. They do a lot of overtime including writing lesson plans. There’s a lot of unpaid labor that goes into being a teacher and she wasn’t even a full fledged teacher (she’s basically an intern).
She has a bad day and it ended her career before it even started. Because a company that propagates it’s brand by marketing it’s private messages as private decided to surveil it’s users.