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.
Snapchat did nothing wrong.
You don’t joke about shooting/harming kids, especially not if you are working close to them.
I get the frustrations of loosing all your work, and it is ridiculous that it happened just by closing the laptop, but you should focus your frustrations toward the software not the kids.
The teacher did nothing wrong either. Making bad jokes and venting your frustration are quite normal things.
If you are human, that is.
Now I’m imagining if a bot made such a joke. That would be a very different situation.