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.
Hate to be that guy, but this is a skill issue.
Sending something that could be misinterpreted by an algorithm or law enforcement over unencrypted channels like this is just a terrible idea.
As an anarchist, I’m be tempted to start a Snapchat account and then send NSA Haikus. (The website generator is defunct, but GitHub still has a repository.)
In fact, the appropriate response is to start regularly including phrases that the AI might flag (say quotes from fiction, cited as such) to generate false positives. Especially if your criminal and political records are completely benign.
But it’s also incredibly fucked up that you have to censor yourself in basically all public forums (including just being outside in many places) just incase a person or bot accidentally or maliciously interprets what you said as arrest worthy. Controlling speech is the first step to controlling thought.