Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School.

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.

www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-snapchat-complaining-about-her-workday-an-hour-later-police-pulled-up-to-her-school

Unpopular opinion: What happened was a good thing.

• One should assume everything they say on the internet is public, even “private” messages on a social media app.
• The person who sent the message needed that reality check after saying something so stupid.
• Though this was a false alarm, it showed a semblance of responsibly from a social media company that is typically evil and indifferent.
• It is not the fault of the social media company that the FBI chose to act on the information.

I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous. People can have morbid humor in the appropriate time and place. If I’m not at an airport, and a joke comes into my head about a bomb at an airport? I’ll happily share that out loud if I’m in an appropriate social setting. Will I do that at an airport? Of course not. If I’m teaching and have a problem student, I’ll feel free to vent, even making a light-hearted joke about “wanting to strangle the little bastard.” In the right place and time, jokes involving threats of violence are perfectly acceptable. Puritans disgust me. It’s always done in bad faith.

Here’s the core problem. These apps literally condition you to view your communications as private. They literally will label things ''private chats." No one expects to be able to like, organize illegal drug deals over Snapchat. But when people hear “private,” their mind immediately treats the space like they would a private conversation in a closed setting.

We still have a lot of cultural reckoning to do with online discussions. A big problem we have right now is that most of our conversations have moved online, even between individuals who know each other IRL. And people always code-switch their conversations. You’ll talk one way in public and another in private with close confidants. A generation ago, someone would make a crude joke in a bar, people would laugh or find it distasteful, and no one would give it a second thought. But online, it exist in a durable form, and that allows bad-faith actors to treat speech much more seriously than it was ever intended.

We need to develop better cultural understanding of what online speech means. For example, I take what I say under this account here much less seriously than I would if I was posting on a social media account under my real name. You should view a pseudonym as someone saying, “My name doesn’t stand behind this. I don’t really take what I write here too seriously. You shouldn’t either. We’re just folks chatting at an airport bar.” But publishing under your own name? That should be viewed like standing on a street corner holding a sign, or writing a letter to the editor under your real name. You’re boldly standing up for your words, and you’ll chose them more carefully accordingly.

People will find some political candidate’s old reddit comments, comments they never put much thought into, and use those to crucify a candidate, citing their half-considered musings as proof of their irredeemable wickedness. We honestly have a lot of growing up to do for how we treat communication. People are very childish about the online communications of others, treating all forms as if they are the most serious forms of expressed beliefs. There’s a time and place for rudeness and crude humor, and we shouldn’t crucify people for being ordinary human beings. That’s how you end up with psychopath politicians who design their entire social life around being as uncontroversial as possible. Honestly, if someone doesn’t appreciate morbid humor? I feel there’s something psychologically wrong with them.

The problem in this case is that Snapchat encourages people to treat their private chats like they would a private conversation between two people in their own home. Yes, their terms of service state they’ll monitor the chat. But they still use dark patterns to encourage you to view the conversation as private and intimate. They do this to make you use the platform more.

Honestly, I see nothing wrong with what this person said. Morbid humor is fine. You would be hard pressed to find a teacher that hasn’t joked about doing something completely inappropriate to a particularly frustrating student. Not always violence. But I’ve certainly vented about wanting to grab a phone out of a student’s hand and smash it with a hammer. Would I actually do that? No. Would I threaten a student with doing that? No. But I’m also repulsed by Puritanical attitudes that pretend this isn’t just a normal way healthy human beings communicate.

Those jokes just happen among close confidants, behind closed doors, and among people who know you’re not being serious. This is just part of being human, and I’m tired of self-righteous haughty people claiming they wouldn’t also be crucified if everything they had ever said was also part of the public record.