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.
I can relate to that. But that is very different than sharing you want to shoot an unrelated (biological) student or the school.
Would you prefer if all serious threats on social media were ignored?
The issue with surveillance is that it relies on the assumption that the people with the privilege to access the information are honorable enough to only use it when necessary and only use it truthfully. I don’t trust our country or corporations not to have an AI “hallucinate” a death threat so that they have reasonable cause to detain anyone they want whenever they want.
Plus, I didn’t really think it’s all that different between my sister and I and a teacher and their students. My wife was a teacher, and while she never said she wanted to shoot a student, she’s certainly said she wanted to strangle one. Most of the other teachers I know have said similarly violent things. I also used to work with doctors, and they often say similar things as well.
People with tough jobs often release stress with violent candid statements about things that frustrate them, then go on to obviously never actually do anything violent. Again, it’s called hyperbole, and is a very common thing across all language. Even if this AI was completely infallible and couldn’t be used dishonestly, it would still have so many false positives that it would be nothing more than a boy who cried wolf.
You are describing a policy failing, not technology. I think we can both agree the policy side of things is sorely lacking. Circumstances where people are detained because of AI reporting without ever looking at the evidence themselves just shouldn’t happen.
Try the hyperbole 'Is there a bomb in my suitcase? What do you think, I would put it in a checked bag?" I’m sure the hilarity will be overwhelming.
What I’m describing is our current reality where policies are enacted for “safety” when really they’re to be abused. The news calls them “bad actors” or “rogue officers” but anyone who doesn’t see them as the expected results they are is fooling themselves. Stories like this are to normalize a system specifically being designed to vilify normal people instead of our actual enemies.
We can’t have a discussion about what a moral government would do with surveillance until we have a moral government. It’s so far from happening that the idea that it will ever be used to provide more good than bad is concernedly naive.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t take threats of violence seriously, I’m saying that a person’s private communications should never be publicly available, regardless of what dangers might go undiscovered, because the real danger of such a policy being misused overshadows that risk by orders of magnitude.
I completely agree there are abuses. But outlawing the technology doesn’t change the mindset of law enforcement. In my opinion, we put pressure on lawmakers to make it criminal to abuse this power. We still protect the vulnerable, and our privacy is protected.
Considering its AI reviewing the texts and not humans, general privacy isn’t compromised. Again, let’s deal with the real issue which is abuse of power.
Ah yes, the old, “any act of state surveillance is acceptable as long as it in theory could increase the safety of children by the width of a single electron.”
This is what the country that was founded on “give me liberty or give me death” has degenerated into.
I’m fine with monitoring Snapchat and actioning death threats. Not sure if you caught this part, but its AI that monitors looking for death threats, not humans.
You are advocating for the death of children.
The policies you support will, on net, kill far more children than they save. These inevitably have an extremely high false-positive rates. For every one actual school shooter you catch, you end up ruining the lives of a thousand innocent children. Many of those will have their lives completely disrupted, many dying early deaths of from suicide and drug overdose.
You are are advocating for the death of children.
That’s a stretch. Your conjecture isn’t supported by the facts of this story whatsoever.