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 agree fully, you don’t joke about shooting kids, period.
It doesn’t matter how frustrated you are, it is just something you don’t do.
Not only that, but the frustration was misdirected toward the kids, and not the software they were using.
Why would it reset everything when closing the laptop?
This is the system working as it should.
Joking is a way to cope, though.
I love my baby dearly and would never do anything to harm her. I still regularly joke with other parents about posting a “baby for sale” sign outside my house. It helps me deal with the lack of sleep, poopsplosions, and, more recently, nipple-bites.
Humour is a reasonably mature coping method, and thought crime should never be a thing.
Thank you.
When school shootings are a weekly thing in a country, it’s probably a good idea to take these things seriously until you can determine whether it’s legitimate.
Or fix the real problems: availability of guns, and lack of appropriate mental health care.
Both need to happen.
We should really have a camera on you right now to see if you’re doing anything dangerous, illegal, or inappropriate.
Big fan of government surveillance, huh?
Nah, I just think that if you mentioning shooting kids, there should be an investigation.
Bullshit.
I can joke about your mommy, and even make bad jokes about her, regardless if she’s on her period or not.
Jokes are one of the things that still decides us from the bots.
Yes you absolutely can, that is a completely different situationthough.
Of course it is. You always joke about the things around you. I can’t make jokes about students, because I have none. But I have your mommy.
You can joke all you want, but some jokes have consequences because the outcome of it not being a joke is very bad.
Would you honestly be cool with Snapchat if a school shooting actually happened and they just sat on the information?
I guarantee everyone downvoting my TLC would be calling for the murder of the CEO.
Any threat of shooting children should be taken seriously until it can be determined the threat wasn’t legitimate. This time it was a joke, but next time might not be.
But you do understand that they did not “have the information” in this case, don’t you?
They created a false suspicion.
No, they didn’t. They reported someone saying they were going to shoot school children. It’s up to the police to gather the information at that point. And they acted quickly to do so.
If you overhear someone say, “I’m going to go home and shoot up my kid so I have someone to get high with,” you shouldn’t assume it’s a joke and report it. (This happens a lot, btw).