Snapchat’s automated system flagged a private DM to three contacts and triggered an FBI alert in under 60 minutes, ending her teaching career
“private” snapchat.
oh but I thought you had nothing to hide Sharon?
I thought you didn’t care about using private messaging?
I thought you said to me that Signal is used only for creeps and drug dealers that need to hide from the police?
Well, thank god you’re not one of those, I guess…good for you Sharon
Where does it say her name is Sharon? Why do you think she cares about private messaging?
Hes talking about his fictional or fictionalized coworker “sharon”, who presumably believes privacy is for criminals
And still Snap says they can’t stop the snap drug trade…
Private message - it isn’t private if it can get flagged 😅 … and seriously, think about everything you have ever said or written, imagine someone taking one of those private sentences out of context… To even think that was a real threat you had to act upon says tons about the country and system, the work- and school environment. Just sad really😢
Oh, I don’t have to imagine it. I once got suspended for two weeks after telling my bullies to “drop dead.” Apparently that’s a “threat.” The context of the phrase never came into play, no investigation into why I’d feel compelled to say something like that, because fuck the victims of bullying, right?
The system has been pouncing on people for snippets of out-of-context phrases for decades. Unfortunately, they rarely catch the people who actually act out their violence.
That’s why big tech renamed them to direct messages (DM).

POV I’m walking past an elementary school.
she sent a private Snapchat message referencing shooting the child or the school
Yeah talking about committing a school shooting is going to get you flagged.
I don’t think the government should be reading private messages
exactly. someone letting off steam to family or friends is as old as time. heck. bar conversation even.
I don’t think teachers should joke about shooting a student…
Such behavior leads me to believe that this individual has a strong tendency to act on their emotions which is a very bad trait for someone working with children. If nothing else it shows that they have poor judgememt.
🙄
in private conversations this happens. they are expressing how high the frustration was with what happened with people close enough to them to know it is not serious. things like this have been said on the phone and in bars for ages.
It usually (probably) isn’t. Snapchat (meta) is reading your private messages and then sending problematic ones to the government.
If you don’t like that, then you should be using a messaging system that’s actually private. Which means, at a bare minimum, end-to-end encryption.
Snapchat is not owned by Meta
Not owned by meta yet
True but in this case the automated system got it right
Pick up that can
While I don’t support mass surveillance, this seems to be a case where it was in the right
“I don’t support fascism, but in this case it’s a good thing.”
Oh cool. “Thought crime”. Great.
By all that is both sacred and profane do not click the link without an ad blocker enabled!
The link wouldn’t let me read it with an adblocker enabled. A window took up the screen telling me to disable it.
Which is why I went to an archive site and read it there.
One reason why you need to use a proper privacy respecting E2EE messaging e.g. Signal.
Jamil has entered the chat. P2P with E2EE, so you only ever need some internet connection to stay in touch, no servers to be taken down.
The only problem is that it’ll eat your phone’s battery like chrome eats RAM
Bonus points for one that does not even have your personal information e.g. Session.
Session is unfortunately not really an improvement. Signal have started work on options which won’t need a number to register, I’d rather wait for that
Session is pretty much dead at this point
+1 for session
also matrix…Wasn’t session closing down?
Add Delta Chat, Briar and Cwtch to that list!
SimpleX best so far. Decentralized but not federated, anonymous and with multi-hops
Briar is in a whole different league, definitely one to use, but at that point may as well add Meshtastic stuff to the list.
Reticulum at that point. Probably its best use case
What I don’t get is how simply closing the laptop deletes anything.
On every laptop and every OS I used closing the lid just makes it go to sleep and everything is the same when you open it back up again. Never was anything deleted.
If somebody know a scenario where stuff would be deleted, please explain so that I can avoid it.
You can set the lid-close trigger to do nothing, suspend, hibernate, or shut down. I’m assuming it was an unsaved document and the lid was set to shutdown on close.
The real question is who has an unsaved lesson plan open on their laptop. Just fuckin’ improv style teaching method.
The same person who would “joke” about shooting a student
you have to go out of your way to disable autosaving drafts these days
Maybe that’s what it was; set it to disable autosave, i.e., save to the cloud so microsofts AI can scan in puke it up somewhere else.
When my PC suspends it unmounts the sd card, which can cause data loss if I am working on something that is not saved to the internal SSD.
I wanna know what monster sets the lid close action to shut down.
Like yeah it should be an option. But nobody should ever pick that option. And anyone who does should be shunned and socially isolated.
ok… in my experience when shutting down windows it asks to save files and blocks the shutdown until then. Same for kde linux. No idea what mac does.
While I don’t support mass surveillance I do think it is entirely inappropriate to “joke” about shooting someone.
A student had walked up to her laptop and deleted her lesson plan mid-class. frustrated, she typed something like “should I shoot him” with a gun emoji.
Yeah not getting any sympathy from me on that one…
It was a private message. You’ve never engaged in hyperbole with your friends?
About shooting children? No. Absolutely not.

Somebody report Bill Watterson for threatening children.
Seriously, I’ve never met an involved parent (or any other child caretaker) who didn’t admit to moments of hyperbole like this, even if only internally. You’re just being a judgemental prick.
ugh. I have met people like this before. I mentioned once to someone. You know when you are so angry you could literally kill em. They responded no never. no one should. Im like. Im talking for a brief second you are seeing red. still they deny. I just dropped it but like would not trust anything coming from that person to be truth.
That’s not a threat, it’s a public comic. I’m not judging anyone, but you have to look at it from the POV of law enforcement. If they saw a comment like this and did nothing, and something actually happened, they’d be absolutely crucified for “ignoring red flags”.
I think the thing here is why are they being contacted about a private message. If anything only those party to it should possibly report it. It stands as it does as a cautionary tale about using any service like this because private conversations should not be looked at in a public announcement kind of way.
I think the thing here is why are they being contacted about a private message
Because WhatsApp scans messages for when “imminent harm exists”.
If anything only those party to it should possibly report it
That’s not how Snapchat works.
It stands as it does as a cautionary tale about using any service like this
Absolutely.
because private conversations should not be looked at in a public announcement kind of way
It wasn’t a “public announcement”, it was forwarded to law enforcement.
yeah by someone who should have never been privy to the convo. I meant that snapchat is treating it like its public discourse.
Did we just move the goalposts from ‘nobody can make jokes like this’ to ‘police have to investigate since they got a report’?
We didn’t move anything, the statement I made was that they get no sympathy from me.
The implication there of course being that she’s in the wrong, hence why she doesn’t deserve any sympathy for having her life destroyed over a dark joke.
Okay now I get it, at first I thought you were being serious but then I realized you were joking with the law enforcement getting crucified comment. You’d have to be literally brain dead to think something that stupid.
Can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but he isn’t. Joking, that is.
Yeah I was being sarcastic haha. I’ve gotten into arguments with this guy before, one of the densest people on lemmy without a doubt.
You dont know any teachers do you?
Of course I do.
Not the people that taught you, i mean friends as an adult.
Does any adult really not know any teachers?
Apparently not you, cause i guarantee that every teacher with experience has had at least one student that turned their humor dark.
yes
















