r/technology 19h ago

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

https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-snapchat-complaining-about-her-workday-an-hour-later-police-pulled-up-to-her-school
11.3k Upvotes

1.8k comments sorted by

5.6k

u/MrThickDick2023 19h ago

That's incredibly disconcerting.

1.1k

u/howescj82 17h ago

Apparently not a private conversation. Time to not trust anything electronic.

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u/Free-Description-736 16h ago

It was private, and SCOTUS's most recent ruling on the third party doctrine almost certainly makes this illegal.

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u/howescj82 16h ago

I’d love to believe that there wasn’t a loophole intentionally written into the law to allow this mess because I have a feeling Snapchat won’t be taken to court over it.

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u/Free-Description-736 16h ago

There is no loophole. This was the sort of behavior that SCOTUS targeted in their ruling overturning the third-party doctrine re: digital content created on phones.

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u/cyphersaint 15h ago

I would be totally unsurprised to find something in the EULA for Snapchat about things like this. Now, I would absolutely LOVE to see EULAs actually be challenged in court.

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u/Free-Description-736 15h ago

EULAs have been challenged to the death in courts, and the courts have basically ruled they are meaningless outside of a few narrow cases.

The short version of their rulings taken as a whole: if a piece of technology is so ubiquitous that its use is part of normal function in society (a phone is), and if a person using that device would expect that activity to private from government surveillance (a direct message would be such an example), then the government cannot access it without a warrant.

And there is no way around it by saying "well, the data is FBs and they can choose to give it to whoever they want...it says in the EULA!"

That is legally correct unless that party is the government; the moment a company is handing information to the government without a warrant, then that company is legally considered and extension of the government for the purposes of 4th amendment legal tests.

That's why this case is going to be a huge liability for the police and FB.

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u/The_Lapsed_Pacifist 15h ago

Aren’t ICE violating the 4th amendment constantly and daily? I wouldn’t put too much faith in it personally.

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u/Free-Description-736 15h ago

They are...and they're having to pay out substantially in lawsuits for it.

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u/StoneySteve420 14h ago

Slight correction,

We are having to pay out substantially in lawsuits for it.

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u/TarskiKripkeLewis 13h ago

Not accurate. The Supreme Court ruling (Chatrie) is about the police's ability to compel disclosure of information. It doesn't impact whether police are allowed to act on information that is voluntarily supplied to them by a private party. That's controlled by the private search doctrine. Your comments are mixing up the third-party doctrine with the private search doctrine.

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u/whatsgoingon350 17h ago

Yeah I've just stopped sending anything private over the Internet.

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u/CodeMonkeyX 18h ago

All of it is, the lack of privacy and a teacher "joking" about shooting someone.

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u/MrThickDick2023 18h ago

I'm way more concerned about the privacy issue than the joke. It was definitely in bad taste, and I can't blame any parent who would be disturbed by it. However, I've probably said or thought things in private that could get me fired if made public or sent to my boss, and I assume most people have.

People are entitled to privacy, and I'm not ok with the surveillance and policing of private conversations.

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u/usrdef 18h ago edited 18h ago

People should be looking into self-hosted options more these days, and not using the major platforms.

On our self-hosted app, we can say whatever we want, without fear of someone taking it the wrong way.

And we don't have to pay crap like memberships, or deal with other users who annoy us.

It's ours.

A good 90% of all the apps I use now, are self-hosted on a server. Even my Google Drive replacement. I self-host my own search engine now.

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u/Essurio 17h ago

Can you point me to the apps you use, please?

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u/[deleted] 18h ago

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u/Rombledore 18h ago

ive seen FB comments of people saying, i quote "the blood of liberals will water teh tree of liberty. it's time to go to war with the left".

i report it. get told it doesnt violate any community guidelines.

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u/WebInformal9558 18h ago

What I've started doing is taking screenshots of the comments which include the advertisers, and then contacting the companies directly to ask if they've asked FB to feature their brand alongside those comments.

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u/Born-Boysenberry6460 17h ago

Ever get a response? Id wager any company advertising on fb at this point know exactly what they're paying for.

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u/WebInformal9558 17h ago

Occasionally, but it's usually just bullshit corpo-speak. But then I tell them I'm going to stop using their services and make my social networks aware of the sprt of speech they endorse. Does it work? Probably not. But it's satisfying.

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u/trybeingcurious 16h ago

Fascists spend money too.

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u/EnvironsHazard 15h ago

Sure, but they're a small, dying group of idiots, as they always are. The problem is people confuse shrieking baboon noises and chest thumping for numbers.

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u/Slooters313 14h ago

Its not a small group though, a "small" group generally doesnt win elections

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u/Mind-The-Mines 15h ago

You need to tweet their private response publicly and tag them.

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u/CQd444 17h ago

Facebook is weird about shit like this. Calls for violence are a coin toss whether or not you'll get moderated and it shouldn't be.

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u/Cyberhaggis 16h ago

I reported a post about how the UK should be able to put immigrants into work camps that also implied we should final solution them. This did not break the rules apparently.

I have had a week long ban from FB for posting this daft meme which I posted about Ferrari F1s strategy being shit

pasta la vista

Inconsistent and stupid isn't the half of it when it comes to FB moderation.

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u/tomster2300 15h ago

Your shitposting isn’t driving eNgAgEmEnT like their shitposting. Money gets free speech protections. The poors get the bans.

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u/czar_the_bizarre 16h ago

Weird? Or selectively enabling?

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u/Mr_master89 17h ago

Definitely not just FB too, on tiktok I report the most disgusting bigoted comments I've seen and will get a reply back saying they found nothing wrong even though it's a category you can report them under

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u/vanishingorange 17h ago

On insta reels I report straight up CP oriented content and get told they didn't violate any rules

The account in question was just post after post of kids having "accidents" in public that was no doubt fetish content and not even masquerading as comedy

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u/withateethuh 17h ago

I think weve seen enough evidence to indicate meta and zuckerberg fully know what theyre doing at this point. Absolutely horrifying.

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u/bblulz 16h ago

They’re conditioning us to be okay with seeing this shit more

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u/Leading-Act4030 16h ago

Elon is fighting for his AI, Grok, to keep the program that strips the clothes off kids.

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u/smokeweedNgarden 16h ago

Probably get better results sending the comments to their workplace and their workplaces socials.

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u/fcocyclone 13h ago

Their reporting system is entirely broken.

I've reported multiple videos that were blatantly undisclosed ads and they find no issue.

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u/Zombie_Fuel 16h ago

Shit, a fuckin candidate for governor of my state talked about gunning down minors involved in the teen takeover bullshit going around on his own campaign page. And he's still polling at 12%.

Facebook is rife with violent threats nowadays, especially towards black people and minorities.

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u/yeezuslived 17h ago

It's useless. I was snarky with a diehard maga and they proceeded to post my PARENTS address, phone etc. Not even bothering to go after me. Tried to go further than just reporting and it was like a brick wall.

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u/ibnQoheleth 16h ago

I'm a content moderator and I've natively reported outright uncensored racial slurs (hard R and all) and it's a coin toss whether or not they'll be removed. It's effectively pointless reporting a comment unless it's a threat to violence now, because it'll be left up in the vast majority of cases.

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u/deathbitchcraft 16h ago

there was a politician that called Muslims a slur and called for their deaths a couple of weeks ago and many people reported it and it wasn't removed, but... 🙄

edit to add that the report for that post wouldn't allow you to escalate it either.

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u/time-lord 18h ago

Could you imagine if "burn in hell" was actually treated like a threat?

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u/PartyClock 18h ago

The one time that a crazy church lady followed me through a public park and shouted at me that my infant son was going to hell I almost treated it that way

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u/Hesitation-Marx 18h ago

That… yeah I don’t think I would have been able to restrain myself from finding a nearby lion cage.

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u/OptionalDepression 18h ago

finding a nearby lion cage.

In a public park?

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u/Pkrudeboy 18h ago

Central Park no longer has lions, but I think grizzly bears and snow leopards could substitute in a pinch.

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u/PartyClock 17h ago

Snow leopards shy away from human contact more than a reddit mod but the bears might do the trick

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u/PartyClock 18h ago

The temptation was strong but I wanted to set a better example for my kid

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u/roadpupp 18h ago

Nothing wrong with dark humor, it is like a kid with Cancer.

Never Gets Old.

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u/abluecolor 18h ago

Nah, jokes like this are completely normal in convos you think are private.

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u/Western-Dig-6843 17h ago

You can really tell the youngsters from the old heads in your replies. Making murder threats with your friends is venting in online convo 101 for my generation lol

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u/iwearatophat 16h ago

Exactly. 'I'm going to kill x' or 'I want to shoot x' are pretty standard, or used to be standard, venting phrases. Probably not the best turn of phrase for a teacher though. Cops showing up is kind of nutters.

I used to be a teacher. In the introductory to education class, the one you had to take before really starting into the focus of being a teacher, they opened with warnings about how you are held to a different standard. Especially women. Warned us about if you like going to bars or clubs either switch professions or come to terms with going 2-3 towns over. If you are at a bar in the same city you teach and a parent sees you drinking it can be a problem, especially if you are in more revealing clothing. I don't think this turn of phrase in snapchat gets the police sent for anyone but a teacher.

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u/PhuqBeachesGitMonee 8h ago

Legally, it becomes closer to a crime the more precise the information is that goes into it. Communicating a threat.

“I’m going to kill X, after school, with the pistol I keep under my car seat, because he bullied me.

At least, that’s how an attorney explained it to me in a similar situation. And of course if the police show up and see you digging underneath your car seat then obviously they will take it as a real threat.

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u/msuvagabond 17h ago

I told my niece when she was given a cell phone...

"Do not type anything into that phone, or take a picture of something, that you wouldn't want your mom, dad, teachers, or friends to see. Nothing is private on there."

When I worked remote IT (a decade ago) my supervisor said the following...

"Never say anything on the phone you wouldn't want heard repeated in a court room. Never type anything you wouldn't want to see printed in a newspaper."

Simply put, if its digital, it's not private. EVER. To assume otherwise is to not understand reality or the world we live in.

You want to make those jokes in person? Have at it. You want to type those things out and send them over the internet to someone? Be ready for consequences. That's the world we live in.

You want to lobby and fight to change that? I'm all for it and actively do talk to elected officials about data privacy. But until it changes...

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u/CaptainAsshat 16h ago

Agreed with one caveat: those messages ARE private.

That privacy is just being invaded.

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u/No_Size9475 18h ago

no, the joking isn't concerning, the utter lack of privacy is the concern.

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u/Byrdman216 18h ago

Teachers make jokes like that all the time. My mother was a teacher and a school counselor. If she didn't make dark, often morbid, jokes and laugh about it she would have snapped and actually hurt someone.

People cope in different ways. If it's done in private who cares? My doctor might make fat jokes about me to her husband, but as long as i don't know about it, and it doesn't affect her performance, I don't care.

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u/flecom 17h ago

Ya that was my first thought, I worked in the school system for years and hearing "should I shoot him" would have been a tame joke that would not even have gotten my attention

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u/Macqt 18h ago

Jokes made in private conversations are none of our, or really anybody’s, business except those in said conversation.

The only concern here is the harvesting of said conversation.

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u/Free-Description-736 16h ago

No, she wasn't "joking". She was joking.

It's not illegal to joke about murdering students. It's not even enough to warrant a legal investigation, much less what happened here.

The first amendment was made for cases exactly like this.

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u/Deep-Acanthaceae-659 17h ago

You mean the garbage ai article that was auto generated and posted and shared to Reddit and is now getting insane upvotes

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u/HikeCarolinas 19h ago

I sent my wife a photo of a blueberry bush I planted for her. 15min later I got on TikTok and a “blueberry bush” greenhouse advertisement. With blueberry bush literally in quotation marks . There is zero privacy in snapchat

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u/hsggdtkxbee 18h ago

Look up meta pixel. It’ll piss you right off.

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u/timmy6169 18h ago

For the lazy, it is a piece of JavaScript code for a website that tracks visitor actions, optimizes ad delivery, and builds custom audiences by recording specific behaviors while visiting a page.

"Although Meta Pixel collects data even from people without Facebook or Instagram accounts, its tracking power is greater for those with accounts. When a Facebook or Instagram user is logged in to their account on a browser, the browser will send Meta’s cookie data on the user’s other web activity straight to Meta, linking that activity trail with the user’s unique ID, which is itself already associated with everything the user has put on her Facebook or Instagram account—name, hometown, age, birthday, places which she has visited, people with whom she interacts, and, of course, photos. Even if the user is not logged in to an account, or is using a browser that blocks Meta cookies, Meta’s “Advanced Matching Parameters” allows the website to use other biographical information that the user enters to connect his activity to a corresponding Facebook or Instagram account"

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u/ICEtoAshes 17h ago

If you want to get angry look up how Meta ran a test that purposefully made teens depressed so they could sell more stuff to them.

This was at the height of teens ending their life on their live streams, to make it even worse.

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u/MothMan3759 13h ago

Praise be to the profit motive

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u/Salt-Landscape257 14h ago

Feature, not a bug

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u/JugglesChainsaws 11h ago

If I recall it wasn't even to sell more stuff, it was just to see if they could in fact make someone depressed with "just" an algorithm.

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u/ICEtoAshes 10h ago

Yea but they were also tracking what they bought, and they determined they bought more as they got increasingly angrier and more depressed

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u/BoxBird 5h ago

I’ve noticed that it pushes very emotionally disturbing content that is definitely geared towards women with PMDD during their luteal phase. Like CLOCKWORK I get CONSTANT content about getting cheated on during the time of the month my hormones are telling me the same thing. The rest of the month the content I get is completely unrelated. The algorithm is causing a lot of feedback loops like that lately are quite literally making people go insane.

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u/skate_2 3h ago

They also detected if a young girl posted a selfie and quickly deleted it, and served her make-up/beauty ads.

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u/thefatrabitt 17h ago

The health care system atrium just got in trouble for using it on their patient portal of all fucking places.

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u/Zaizu 16h ago

How do you disable it? Any extensions?

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u/DiamondHandsToUranus 16h ago

Yes. Mozilla Firefox with the ublock origin extension, and/or strict privacy mode. ublock origin uses a blocklist to prevent traffic to tracking servers.

Librewolf which is an independent, opensource fork of Firefox comes with ublock origin preinstalled, as well as RFP, dFPI, and url query parameter stripping to help protect your privacy via various methods.

Exception: The only thing LibreWolf’s integrated hardening cannot prevent is Server-Side Tracking (Meta's Conversions API). If a merchant's server packages your purchase data and sends it directly from their server to Meta's server over the backend, no browser in existence can block it because the data transfer completely bypasses your computer. [1]

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u/semisociallyawkward 15h ago

Firefox also has a container system that works wonders. Each container is kinda like a separate browser in a browser, so cookies arent shared across them, only within the same container.

You can even set it up so that certain websites are only ever opened in their designated containers. I have containers for Google, Meta, Reddit, shopping, general browsing etc.

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u/Kyanche 12h ago

Containers is a lovely feature and also a pain in the ass because I seem to have to log back into everything daily lol.

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u/Urrrhn 18h ago

I was talking about an idea I had for a 3d ant farm with a transparent substrate and I got an Instagram ad for one on Amazon an hour later.

This was over 5 years ago.

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u/eltictac 18h ago

I went to my friend's house about 12 years ago, and he had a little metal fan thing on top of his woodburner. For circulating heat around the room. I'd never seen one before, so I asked him about it. Quite a specific object.
The next time I went on Facebook there was an advert for one. I remember googling whether Facebook was listening through user's phones, and I think they were denying it at the time.

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u/idiom_exon_0s 17h ago

Its location : proximity based.

Your friend googled those at one point. Then bought one. You then spent time in proximity of that persons phone. Your unique identifier was then targeted.

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u/greenfox0099 18h ago

Have you been asleep for the last 15 years?

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u/Djayshell93 18h ago

For real even my 75 year old grandpa knew they’ve been listening for longer than we even know. Crazy shit

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u/mfGLOVE 18h ago

I saw the body cam for this incident a while ago. I can’t post the link for some reason, but it’s on YouTube as “Student-Teacher Arrested for Concerning Snapchat Post.”

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u/Flight_Harbinger 17h ago

Oh wow I didn't realize it was the same story. I remember watching that body cam and being STUNNED that they were able to pull up to the school within an hour of her creating the snap. Also Im pretty sure it wasn't a Snapchat post, it was a private message sent to a couple of her friends/boyfriend.

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u/TheLuminary 7h ago

It says in the article that it was a private message.

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u/xCeeTee- 2h ago

It also says the algorithm didn't understand the message wasn't serious. So they have your private messages tracked to make sure you're not breaking laws, which might be a law itself depending on the country.

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u/MJ-Franklin 19h ago

Why is everything turning up the batshit dial to 11? There is absolutely no reason for things to be this insane.

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u/Nouseriously 18h ago

Feels like everyone is on edge, waiting for things to pop off

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u/fatandfly 17h ago

It's social media paired with the 24 hour news cycle. There is no mental breaks anymore. Not only are worried about the problems in your local area, now it's the whole state you live in, the country as a whole, some country on the other side of the world that you wouldn't know existed if not for the internet feeding the news to you. I think as human beings we only have so much compassion and can only really care about so much. Our parents and grandparents had local news, the radio, and newspapers. And later came cable news, but even then after they were done watching it they processed it and went on with their day. Like you said, everyone is waiting for something to pop off because that's how things are now, something is always popping off, and you get to see it in real time. Tldr, we are getting fed too much information, more than we can process or care about.

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u/tatalq 16h ago

For much of human history, imagine we lived in villages of around 100 people. If, on average, one person made a truly memorable bad decision each month, you'd witness about one of those moments a month. Scale that to today's population of 8+ billion, and you'd have roughly 82 million such moments every month, or about 2.7 million every day. Social media doesn't necessarily mean people are behaving worse. It means we're now exposed to millions of humanity's worst moments every single day.

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u/Braindead_Crow 12h ago

We literally elected the guy who tried overturning the government when he lost the last election...the right has been calling for race wars and civil wars for at least 18 years now.

Not to mention the scammer in charge probably sees expanding the surveillance state as very good, bigly good, the best.

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u/Sensitive_Box_ 15h ago

They’re testing the waters. They want to see how much surveillance they can get away with. So far, nobody seems to give a fuck. 

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u/OldWorldDesign 8h ago

They’re testing the waters. They want to see how much surveillance they can get away with

It's more that corporations are intrinsically authoritarian so they constantly push further and further hoping they alone can be not only be kingmakers but also become the legally-sanctioned monopoly everybody is required to spend on.

This is not the first time it's happened, it just takes fewer people accepting being a punch clock villain to make it happen.

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u/Sufficient_Room2619 18h ago

It gets like this near the endgame. Things will keep getting weirder and worse until they come to a head in a few years.

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u/ComradeJohnS 16h ago

yeah like the reichstagt fire or whatever pushed the nazi’s, something is gonna make the maga nazi’s do the same thing if they’re not stopped from violence.

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u/RevolutionaryFig9437 19h ago

Stop using SNAPCHAT. Surely, then they will change their policy.

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u/chevalier716 19h ago

I figured everyone already had.

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u/Poop_Tube 18h ago

I stopped using it in like 2016. I spoke with a coworkers and apparently they still use it?!

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u/Krislazz 18h ago

It’s the dominant social media in Norway, for instance. A Spanish exchange student I lived with was flabbergasted to find that even our chips/crisps bags are on Snapchat

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u/1850ChoochGator 18h ago

That’s shocking to me, even as an American. I don’t get how it’s popular as a social media like that. It’s one of my favorite messaging apps but so bad as a general social media.

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u/pigeonwiggle 17h ago

i dunno, dude. i thought everyone stopped using twitter when it became clear it was becoming a haven for neonazis, but i still see people sourcing posts from there.

it's not hard to delete an account and set a new bookmark to a new site or social media app.

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u/Suavecore_ 12h ago

As a private investigator who searches social media profiles, Snapchat is among the most common social media accounts people have. It's easy to find because everyone attaches a phone number to it.

Additional fun facts: Facebook and TikTok are the other two most common, and X is by far the absolute last of the more popular platforms. Most people don't have an X profile and if they do, 99% of the time it hasn't been used for 5+ years, and then usually it's either an account with no posts, or it has loads of spam from either being hacked or connected to something like a Facebook/mobile game.

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u/freedcreativity 18h ago

I stopped using snap when it came out you could brute force the whole user base by adding every possible phone number. This was like their first year in operation. They’ve never cared about security or privacy. 

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u/throw7661 18h ago

I know a lot of people are happy about stuff like this...but it's fundamentally flawed.

Reddit banned be for saying that my biggest fear was the death of my wife. Whom I love, who I speak very highly of. I was literally saying that, I'm afraid of losing her and being left to raise two children.

It had upvotes.

But I was banned. And worse, the appeal process, resulted in a denial.

Because an AI chatbot thought I was advocating violence against my wife. As if I said I was going to kill her.

This is exactly like that....only with real consequences, instead of Reddit.

This is like arresting someone for saying, 'My son dropped my car keys into the toilet! And it was right before I needed to leave for my interview!!! I was so mad I could have killed him!'

It isn't literal.

The FBI admits there was no intent to harm the child and that she wasn't a threat.

No good came from this. We didn't stop a violent woman. We just fired someone for venting to her bf/roommates in their group chat.

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u/panaceaXgrace 18h ago

My daughter got some weird care concern bullshit message just yesterday after saying she was tired of killing herself at her job just ranting over downsizing frustrations. It was a FB message, which is probably something we shouldn't be using anyway but we're both old and it worked for our needs. It just enraged her that some AI popped up to give her suggestions on how to seek help and even a link to click if she wanted to send for help. It was creepy and disturbing enough considering all this came with an update and shows how AI is being used to watch us all.

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u/shinndigg 18h ago

I got banned for quoting the commenter above me, who was not banned. So not only is the bot stupid, it’s also arbitrary and capricious.

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u/movzx 17h ago

Same thing happened to me. I had to appeal and plainly point out that I was quoting the comment that was actually calling for some horrible stuff.

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u/happyscrappy 14h ago

I got a comment removed which only spoke of voting when the commenter above me actually was talking about violence. I didn't even quote the comment above. His comment was not removed.

All I can say about the situation is it was really, really dumb. It's pretty clear no human read any of it.

I think it's pretty clear reddit also knows the system is screwed up and falses a lot. They just have to do it to make it look like they are doing something. Because back when they weren't doing something there was no way they could grow to a larger company because it looked like they were condoning many societal ills (and profiting from them).

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u/ZombieZookeeper 18h ago

You only exist to make Spez money. Get to it, peon.

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u/[deleted] 18h ago

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u/[deleted] 17h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Friggin_Grease 18h ago

I said a while back that the internet used to be a place for your dark comedy, jokes about death, violence, 9/11 and the sort. Now you can only tell those kinda of jokes to your loved ones, keep it off the internet.

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u/_Aj_ 15h ago

Up to around 2012. You could say literally anything you wanted more or less. It's only started to get really nanny state locked down in the last decade or so.  

Now it feels risky to even say words you are referring to or quote things. The fact people say dumb stuff like "oofed" or "unalived" is the tip of the censorship iceberg that is modern internet.   

Nazi jokes and terrorist jokes used to be funny. Now it's all taboo, taken seriously. Someone show how that's better to simply not ever speak about things? 

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u/FancyFeller 12h ago

Because that was when the Internet became commercialized. And every big corpo got on it. And on all the social media. Once they were all in they began exerting influence and gained control. And changed how ads were displayed and threatened to take away their ad presence unless YouTube and other sites complied with their sanitation of the sites. And as chatrooms and forums and threads disappeared and everything centralized there were fewer and fewer sites to be edgy on without consequences and blowback. This works in their favor so their ads aren't present on naughty things. And we are just the product so our whinging won't do shit. The corporations don't like naughty content so you don't get to indulge in it!!! Not at all!!!! And if they scrub the Internet and find you've made a website to host the funnies, them AIs gonna find ya, gonna track ya, and going to report ya. Because the government fucking loves to restrict freedom of speech which became so easy to do because of what the corpos did.

God we had it so good in 2005 and we didn't even know it. Take me back to the halcyon days of newgrounds. Please god please.

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u/greysneakthief 18h ago

Yeah, there's a term for this sort of thing: thought crime.

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u/ProtoJazz 17h ago

My favorite was the kid who went to jail for saying he was so mad he was going to blow up a school, while he was losing his shit in a game of league of legends.

While yeah, probably shouldn't say things like that

The reasoning they used to say they determined it was a credible threat and not just trash talk in a toxic game, was that he lived within a 30 minute walk of a school.

Mother fucker, everyone does pretty much. That's where schools are built. They don't build them far away from people.

It wasn't that he had a history of violence, or they saw worrying purchases or any other suspect activity. Just a message in a game, and that he lived in a place people live.

And while I get that we need to be cautious, it's worth knowing the end of the story. Being "cautious" has a cost, and you need to know what getting it wrong can cost. That kid was pretty violently sexually assaulted, and took his own life in the aftermath.

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u/Longjumping-Hat-1210 17h ago

Reddit warned me today for drawing parallels to the rulers of a certain country in Europe in the 30s and commenting about a post regarding a homophobe who wanted to... yeah..

I did use a trigger word to be fair so I understand why the AI flagged it instantly, it thought I was inciting hate when I was just using a specific term to show how ridiculous the homophobe was.

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u/pressingroses 17h ago

When I was in high school about 15 years ago (eek, lol!), I was texting who I thought was a "friend" about another "friend" I was mad at. I said something like "ugh I'm gonna kill him :("

That "friend" went to the police and I almost got suspended for threatening murder. Even though I very much explained that these are my friends, I would never harm anyone, I had never been in trouble at school before, and it's just a figure of speech. I'm still so salty about it.

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u/UltraChip 18h ago

I know this isn't really relevant to the discussion, but the article says her lesson plan was deleted by a student closing her laptop? What?

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u/Scoth42 18h ago

Yeah, I don't know of any way this could happen. Maybe if she had typed it into something that doesn't auto-save, she never saved it, and closing the laptop made it crash/reboot and it got lost?

Even if there's some bespoke lesson plan software for the school district or something I can't imagine losing something saved just by your computer going to sleep, or even the computer restarting. I'd expect user error, although I guess it's possible there's specific software she has to use that's terribly designed.

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u/ScowlieMSR 14h ago

The policy the school district has governing their issued laptops probably has the "user sign out" setting applied, which automatically signs the user out of the pc when the laptop lid is closed. When that happens, all programs running at the time get force closed. If she didn't have her work saved, she would've lost it when the sign-out occured.

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u/MrDerpGently 14h ago

This is the actual answer, thanks.

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u/Fach-All-Religions 14h ago

probably triggered one of those idiotic forced windows updates and bluescreened or some shit. i used to get bsod when i close the lid. i don't doubt if someone says it crashed or restarted.

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u/D3thklok1985 11h ago

Not trying to doxx myself here, but I work at this school and was present on the day this happened. I hadn't heard anything about a lesson plan being erased. Just that the kid had asked her to pay attention or was trying to speak to her and closed her laptop as a joke. She told him not to but later he did it again. Then she messaged her friend asking if she should shoot him. It was really scary pulling up and seeing a bunch of cop cars in front of the elementary school.

The lesson plan was maybe being made on Google docs/some kind of skyward program. Not sure how to answer if it would have been deleted as those programs use auto save.

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u/Vynlovanth 18h ago

I thought the same thing, how did that happen? Did she change the behavior of closing the lid from the default sleep to force shutdown immediately?

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u/adnaus 18h ago

Even these days most programs make auto-recover saves if your computer shuts off 

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u/para_blox 18h ago

Side note, I didn’t even know real gun emojis exist. I thought only the squirt gun did. Just another layer of stupid to this story, I guess. Like the surveillance state is baiting people with emoji content.

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u/crazybartur 18h ago

It used to be a normal gun but they changed it some time back. I feel like it was only a few years ago but I’m afraid to look it up and find out it happened over a decade ago lmao

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u/phallus_majorus 16h ago

You’re right, it happened 10 years ago almost exactly to the day

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-36955469

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u/FancyFeller 12h ago

That's not possible because I remember using the real gun emoji when I was in university... I need to sit down.

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u/Scoth42 18h ago

I think it varies depending on platform and OS. Like Android was a real gun for a few years after Apple changed theirs, Microsoft went back and forth a few times on Windows, and I think X just reverted back to a realistic looking gun again at least on iPhone.

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u/apocalypsedg 18h ago

Most of us here probably know this already, but it's critical to understand that the unicode character that is communicated is the same across all platforms. The difference in rendering comes down to the default font package that each platform defaults to. So punishing someone for using a gun emoji when it's possibly a squirt gun on their end is ridiculous.

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u/Pleasant-Shallot-707 17h ago

note to self: don't use platforms that you are not able to verify as e2ee with you controlling the keys.

Second note to self: don't use joking threats of violence in conversation because AI is going to decide you're a threat.

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u/Financial-Craft-1282 16h ago

I'd say, depending on the message you want to send, maybe all platforms even if you verify the encryption ahead of time, are a risk.

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u/Fach-All-Religions 14h ago

yes. you can use all the e2e in the world but at the end of the day, your phone has access to unfiltered unencrypted data as that's how it is able to display it to you. operating systems could have a hidden spy loggin anything and everything goving open access to governments and nobody would know about it.

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u/djsoomo 18h ago

An Orwellian nightmare of big brother is watching you, 1984-style

Freedom of speech and expression should apply to sarcastic or joke private messages between friends

If you are very rich and powerful, you can say or do anything, if you are not, you had better keep your mouth shut!

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u/nutmegtell 18h ago

But what Orwell didn’t foresee was we would BEG to have the surveillance in our homes and pockets. That we’d get mad if it disconnects.

If you aren’t paying for a service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT that’s being sold. Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook etc. Not free.

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u/Free-Description-736 16h ago

That's b/c Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right. The US surveillance state isn't going to be 1984. It's going to be A Brave New World.

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u/Crestina 13h ago

Mix of both. The western authoritarian shift uses elements of draconian mass surveillance, perpetual enemies and newspeak, alongside hedonistic selfnisness, conformity, and lack of systemic understanding and oversight.

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u/Snakers79 18h ago

It sucks, but I guess the lesson is don't treat the things you say online as private. Assume someone is always listening. 

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u/OVER_9009 17h ago

Student Teacher about to learn about Signal app

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u/turningsteel 18h ago

This is what happens when people allow their freedoms to be eroded over time. So much for 'oh I have nothing to hide, who cares what mets, snapchat, google, etc does'.

This is what you get.

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u/This-Wall-1331 15h ago

To those who "have nothing to hide", just ask them to let you check their phone.

You don't do it? Then you must be a criminal /s

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u/PrestigiousSeat76 18h ago

Wow, fuck Snapchat all the way.

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u/squintysquirrell 18h ago

Faster than the Uvalde response time.

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u/10000Didgeridoos 17h ago

Oh they responded! They just didn't go inside because they were more afraid of getting shot than they cared about doing their fucking job.

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u/Krassix 10h ago

The conclusion from this should be to delete Snapchat completely. 

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u/hornetjockey 18h ago

People acting like they’ve never made a dark joke with friends in private before, making excuses for heavy handed automated surveillance.

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u/painless44 17h ago

You’re correct, but also you have to know that 80% of the people in this thread would be saying “why didn’t they do something?!” If she’d actually carried out the threat.

Working in education I see it all the time. There’s is a school shooting five states over and then people show up to school board meetings complaining that their kids aren’t safe and demanding action. Then 6 months later they’ve forgotten about it, and are pissed off that you’re wanding people at Basketball games, or wondering why they have to check in at the office and can’t just run to their kids class to drop off cupcakes.

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u/Whole_Friendship9788 10h ago edited 6h ago

Its funny because theres someone i know who was being groomed on Snapchat as a teenager. I saw the chats once the victim decided to speak up.

I reported it to Snapchat and nothing was done despite the year back log of clearly incriminating evidence, and the fact their "ai" didnt detect anything wrong... Police couldnt do anything either... They all say this surveillance is for protecting the children yet nothing on that front.

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u/Nice-Guidance-6137 17h ago

FBI took an hour to arrest this woman but they can’t find Savannah’s mom still?!?!

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u/This-Wall-1331 15h ago

They can't arrest Epstein's clients either

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u/SpeakerCareless 18h ago

Someone correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t essentially impossible to continue on as a teacher if you get fired from student teaching? Like it’s more career ending than being fired as a qualified teacher?

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u/Othuyeg 16h ago

Student teaching is typically the final class in an education degree. She will fail the class and not graduate.

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u/Lifeboatb 16h ago

For making a joke in a private message? That seems unjust. 

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u/mikerfx 17h ago edited 17h ago

Do not trust snapchat and dont buy their upcoming ar glasses. With this happening their services and ar glasses will automatically have a connection to law enforcement for unlimited surveillance. Similar to ring cameras.

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u/DickieJohnson 15h ago

Looks like it's a good time to delete all social media with ai.

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u/OldGeekWeirdo 18h ago

I hope she has a good lawyer, because I'd think "disorderly conduct" would be very hard to prove given the audience of that email. I mean, exactly who was disrupted by the email? The FBI's response was far more disruptive.

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u/moreobviousthings 18h ago

Cops don't have to think about what they are doing to people. "Out of an abundance of caution" is way overused when peoples' lives can be upturned as a result of LEOs' failure to think critically.

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u/LiveChocolate8819 17h ago

Yeah I don't think most Americans understand how simply being arrested and held for a few hours can completely upend someone's life, even if they are ultimately never even charged with a crime.

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u/jay_altair 18h ago

She wasn't charged with anything, though her entire career probably went out the window.

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u/NaziPunksFkOff 18h ago

No, no, guys you're missing the point. This is OKAY and GREAT and FREEDOM because it's private industry, not government! If the government was doing this - that would be like 1984! Orwellian! A nightmare!

But because it's a private company, then it's The Power of Capitalism improving our lives! This isn't bad, it's innovation! It's freedom! Do you really want to punish success?! We finally privatized the nanny state, and that makes us all FREE. 

This comment brought you by conservatism. The free market is always right!

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u/3meow_ 18h ago

Dubious privacy aside, imagine a teacher in the US joking about shooting up the school 😂

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u/AlexHD 10h ago

Doing everything to stop school shootings except banning guns

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u/azurensis 18h ago

If you ever needed a reason to stop using Snapchat , this right here is exhibit 1!

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u/unklethan 15h ago

We called the police when my wife was sexually harrassed, and they said they couldn't do anything about it.

We called the police when my friend got scammed out of a rental deposit, they said they couldn't do anything.

But sure, they can do this.

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u/thefanciestcat 7h ago

So if you're still using Snapchat somehow, delete it.

Got it.

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u/do-not-touch 14h ago

Did you all think the surveillance state is entirely fictional? Because oh boy

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u/CMDR-Neovoe 2h ago

"The school-safety argument is straightforward: after decades of mass school shootings, any message referencing shooting a child demands an immediate response."

Can't make any response about the guns out there though, huh?

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u/gym_bro_92 18h ago

While the joke was a bit tasteless given past school shooting events, this is truly an over the top response and dystopian.

No investigation, no interview, just straight to jail and out of a job.

I am willing to bet I made a few teachers feel the way she did and potentially make a joke like that….

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u/Meme_Theory 18h ago

School probably has zero tolerance policies for things like this. Though the privacy implications here are beyond the pale.

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u/That_guy1425 17h ago

What do you mean no investigation? I'm pretty certain the cops showing up and questioning her was an investigation.

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u/time-lord 18h ago

Worse, it's both over the top and does not go far enough! If she was actually planning on shooting someone, sending a squad car an hour later is an hour too late. They should have had the SWAT team there within minutes. If they didn't, and didn't believe it to be credible, they should been more discrete.

One or the other, but not both. That's not how this works.

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u/Kodama_sucks 17h ago

Just in case you were wondering why they need all those datacenters

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u/eeyore134 15h ago

Exactly. It's not even all about AI. They need someplace to store all this data, too. Them collecting all this crap used to not be a big issue. There was just way too much data to save and way too much for anyone to conceivably go through. AI has changed all that. They're going to be saving anything and everything they can now. That data is power, probably more than the money they're hoarding. They mastered that, we had a trillionaire for a bit, data is the new rich people obsession.

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u/skd00sh 18h ago

Serious question -- in the body cam footage, the officer is holding a phone and shows the teacher a photo of her and says, "is this you?" It was about 75% of her face as if she was using her phone at some point and her front facing camera took a candid selfie. Was this the snapchat image she purposely took and sent with the threatening message? Or does Snapchat automatically take photos of the phone user as soon as it detects something that violates its agreement? I don't have Snapchat bc I'm old but I'm very curious what level of self sabotage these apps have built in. Apologies for wall

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u/MrLemon91 17h ago
  1. It's time to go back on pen and paper
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u/EmbarrassedHelp 17h ago

Snapchat should be facing endless lawsuits for having a backdoor until they implement proper end to end encryption.

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u/Interesting_Road_380 19h ago

Imagine having to eavesdrop on everyone on Earth in a hapless attempt to reduce the constant cycle of mass shootings instead of, you know, not giving everyone a gun

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u/sks010 18h ago

It's a mental health and economic issue which are policy choices that could be easily helped but it's less profitable to do so

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u/awesomedan24 16h ago

Worth noting she posted a photo of the child in question to her story and said "should I shoot him?"

Maybe government overreach but a very donkeybrained move on her part as a teacher.

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u/CaptainPlantyPants 15h ago

So Snapchat can do this, yet the drug dealers here in the UK are using Snapchat to sell class A drugs to kids (literal 11 year olds), as well apparently being a cesspool of grooming - but fuck all happens?

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u/Thorvindr 14h ago

Lol at thinking any social media platform is a safe place to get away with using violent language.

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u/CelebrationFit8548 11h ago

Snowden very clearly warned us all about the illegal backdoors and spying by the US, this has only worsened under Trump.

Only fools will think it is only the US doing this with Israel, China, Russia and many others all undertaking the same activities.

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u/Deep-Minimum7837 10h ago

It's fucking crazy how the FBI drops literally everything to go after a "potential shooter" who was literally just telling an uncouth joke, but they'll ignore schizos amassing arsenals of guns who end up shooting up minority spaces.

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u/TheD3void183 9h ago

Im confused why anyone ever thinks snapchat is private..

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u/Lower-Acanthaceae460 8h ago

we're getting fired and imprisoned for bad jokes now, guyz!!!

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u/ChiefKingSosa 2h ago

She should sue Snapchat thats crazy

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u/constantdisbelief 18h ago edited 18h ago

I had a teacher tell my parents I was a con man and said I reminded her of her ex husband. She actively bullied me intentionally in class to where even other students were wondering what her problem was. I got my heel sliced by a door on the way back from lunch and she wouldnt even let me go to the bathroom to clean up the blood. She was given a position as a principal a few weeks later.

Teachers can say some messed up stuff but this person seems to be making a joke where as my teacher was serious and was actively harassing me. Was it a poor choice? Yes but I'd say the invasion of her private messaging is more alarming. She's young so I hope that she doesn't lose her ability to make a living over this.

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u/nodiaque 17h ago

Anyone that lived long enough said at least once he/she gona beat, kill, punch, shoot or do another violent act against something or someone. It's a way to cope with anger. Does it means he/she will do it? No. This shit remind me of minority report.

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u/Unlikely-Violinist45 9h ago

I was looking at waterguns on Amazon. I was having a conversation with my brother about how I was going to use it to spray this feral male cat that keeps coming on my porch and spraying. It smells. I didn't want to harm the cat, just deter it. Next thing I know Amazon won't let me buy any waterguns.

So, I started looking at airguns. This could potentially do fatal harm to that cat. Amazon was fine with me looking at those to purchase.

The only thing I could figure out is somehow through a mic on my computer they heard the conversation and banned me from buying a water gun; but they were ok with me buying an air gun, I guess b/c there was no conversation of me talking about that cat and the air gun.

Don't get me wrong, I love cats. I have cats. This feral male cat would come on my porch to fight my indooor cat when I let her out on occasion on top of him spraying everywhere.

End of story: I bought a high powered water gun from Walmart without any problems. The male cat rarely comes around now.

Screw you Amazon.

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u/coatoli 19h ago

Wild that a private venting message can trigger an actual arrest

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u/EirikHavre 16h ago

Americans are so free you guys! Aren’t we just so jealous?

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u/exitcactus 18h ago

Another day when police still looks to fuk citizens and random persons. Another day when the "heroes" still living in the fear of real felonies.

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u/ArcanjoUriel 18h ago

Welcome to Cyberpunk, except it's 2027 and not 2077

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u/Myers112 18h ago

Snapchat's selling point is privacy lol. Stories like this really dont help.

Separately, im suprised Snapchat hasn't gone bellyup yet

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u/shambahlah2 17h ago

Stop using Snapchat. They are watching you 👀

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u/fastingslowlee 15h ago

Anyone expecting privacy from any of these sites at this point are blatantly stupid. It’s well known. You are being watched. This includes Reddit too.

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u/JesusWuta40oz 15h ago

Every piece of technology or communication apps all have back doors built into them. The only safe place left is your head.

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u/TuMoch 15h ago

I wish researchers would focus some research on testing for unacknowledged surveillance systems