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.
Yeah, I’d call it an invasion of privacy.
But you’re making a false equivalence fallacy anyways. It’s not the same an app that claims to be private and a public site, and even in the latter any joke SHOULD NOT BE prosecuted if it not involves obvious, clear and sound planning of really doing it. You can like or dislike more or less that joke, but it’s still just a joke.
What privacy existed? (Note: not the illusion of privacy.) Snapchat has full access to all her messages, and always has.
She was not charged, let alone prosecuted.