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 bullshit is getting out of hand.
I know it’s not nearly the same level, but over on reddit I participated in a thread. Nevermind full context, someone said something about “The first half of life [something]”, someone replied “and the second half of life [something]” and I jokingly said “And the third half of life, you’re dead.”
Couple replied to that - it was minorly amusing in context - and one of them said “Now I’m sad”. So I jokingly said “Well, good news is you won’t be sad when you’re dead”.
Within a few minutes, I got a warning from reddit and the comment removed.
So I appealed the warning (because if AI removes another comment, you get a 3 day suspension, then 7 day, then 30 day, then permanent), but also rephrased the commeny and basically make the joke while not even saying “dead”, but I also rolled my eyes at the reddit AI.
I almost immediately got a permanent ban.
THEN THE STUPIDEST BIT: They overturned the warning BUT KEPT THE PERMANENT BAN.
Fucking idiots.
Dont’ judge me for still spending some time on reddit, I mod a couple of places. THAT account is still going, but I also don’t use that account except to mod because of this bullshit with reddit that’s been getting worse.
I got a warning for saying I wanted to shoot the noisy mic children (in Reddead Redemption within the Reddead Redemption subreddit). I guess next time I say I want to troll badly behaved children in a videogame I’m going to have police called on me now?
I got the warning overturned but AI moderation is fucking ridiculous.
Go to the circus, expect to see clowns.
there seems to be a disconnect between what the admin does, unbanning and the autobanning from reddits AI moderation, if admins unban an account but the Ai still catches you, because it detected a pattern (which they build a profile of potential spammers)which got you banned in the first place and bans you any ways, they dont want the filter clean.