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 admit, as an outsider looking in, I am a bit surprised how many people are okay with these jokes.
It’s just a joke until it isn’t, and then it isn’t so funny. However, I do get that it can literally just be a joke and nothing more, but I do have a hard time compartmentalizing it like that.
With that said, just like anyone else here, I’m not really a fan of mass surveillance either so I obviously feel conflicted.
It’s more of a vent than a joke. “In private” with trusted friends. If this was something said out loud or even on a public tweet I’d get it. But this seems to fall closer to something like confiding in therapy than that.
Ofc, a trained therapist would understan this is a rant. The AI does not, and the FBI couldn’t care less about context.
Here’s the thing. It’s an off color joke. Snapchat didn’t report her “master plan” to smuggle weapons into the school.
It reported what was essentially a private vent session from a woman who is young enough to have lived through a lot of the security theater of the active shooter drills happening in schools across the US to this day.
It would be like a boomer or perhaps Gen X’r making a joke about bomb shelters.
Or a millennial making jokes about suicide or bomb threats (both of which are things a lot of millennials actually have made jokes about).
Is it a cool thing to say in mixed company? No. But she wasn’t saying it in mixed company. She was talking to her boyfriend. She had the expectation that it was a private conversation.
It’s extremely likely that she wouldn’t have made the same joke if she had known it wasn’t private.
In any case though, you don’t have to be okay with the joke to see that this is basically an algorithmic invasion of someone’s expected privacy and that is an overstep in the name of security that actually violates privacy for security theatre.
You mean to tell me they can scramble a whole FBI team in less than an hour for a “terroristic threat” that isn’t even viable, but they let all those kids get shot in Uvalde?
There have been multiple active shooters who actually posted manifestos online before they committed the acts and those guys didn’t get a visit from the FBI in full riot gear.
How many people do you know who have made a joke about killing their boss? When I was in the Navy, Marines used to deliberately make dead baby jokes for the shock value. It’s not okay, but it is a fact that it happens and that’s unlikely to change.