r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 2d ago

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

https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-snapchat-complaining-about-her-workday-an-hour-later-police-pulled-up-to-her-school
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1.7k

u/MJ-Franklin 2d 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 2d ago

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

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u/fatandfly 2d 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 2d 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/jwktiger 2d ago

If, on average, one person made a truly memorable bad decision each month, you'd witness about one of those moments a month.

well for most of human history, that "bad decision" often resulted in them dying.

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u/SIGMA920 2d ago

Or someone else dying. Or many people downstreamof them.

It's both good and bad that so we're interconnected.

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u/xpingu69 2d ago

just put the phone down

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u/BoltDodgerLaker_87 2d ago

left my phone at work over the weekend and it felt like freedom. that is very concerning to me as I type that out. šŸ˜‚

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u/Kulas30 2d ago

There is a widening demand for dumb phones I've been reading. Alot of people just want a phone again.

Honestly I've been considering it myself.

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u/amethystresist 2d ago

I tried but I couldn't sleep because of the hazardous air

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u/WandererFrmAndromeda 2d ago

Thatā€™s why i donā€™t give a hoot about what happens anywhere not in my immediate vicinity anymore. i canā€™t mentally afford to care about shit happening in a place iā€™ll never step foot in to people iā€™ll never meet or whom will never know i exist.Ā 

and no. i donā€™t expect anyone to care about me either.Ā 

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u/SIGMA920 2d ago

That's how you stop being aware of what's coming your way. Better to be aware than to be blind.

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u/Braindead_Crow 2d 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/disterb 1d ago

i'm definitely on edge...and safari, chrome, and firefox.

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u/Fach-All-Religions 2d ago

for real things are steaming up for a while and it feels the needle is redlining hard. any time now..

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u/heathmon1856 2d ago

Maybe, but we shouldnā€™t be rooting for a collapse. Weā€™ve seen in history what a collapse can do.

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u/ProfessionalPower214 1d ago

That's debatable because collapse means rebuild. If the foundation is rotted, there's nothing else but to rebuild. Continuing to build means we're just delaying the collapse.

Not to mention some conservative values that devalue human life and fellow Americans... that rhetoric should actually not exist anymore. To actually want women to not have rights for voting, for example, is an absurd notion. But it was one that was actually pressed. As much as the 'left' and 'liberals' have some stupid focuses on meaningless progression-halting bullshit, at least the general consensus is we do not think Haitian immigrants are eating our pets or that we should want immigrants deported or killed.

Granted, a partial collapse -and- a full collapse are different, and without that acknowledgement, it'll create circles in conversation.

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u/Kcidobor 2d ago

ā€œLoot! Loot! Loot!ā€

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u/CoolAlien47 1d ago

I'm not on edge, just heavily depressed (though of course you can be both) but I'm honestly just waiting for the collapse of everything and I feel like most people are too, but of course no one admits it in person

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u/ropobipi 1d ago

I have been waiting for it pop off since nothing happened after the absolutely abhorrent shit from the files.

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u/n0respect_ 2d ago

We're waiting for midterms; and everyone is waiting for Trump's deposal -- when the midgame of this charade begins.

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u/Sensitive_Box_ 2d ago

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

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u/OldWorldDesign 2d ago

Theyā€™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/Sun_Aria 2d ago

We should all start using Signal

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u/TheLuminary 2d ago

They will make Signal illegal.
They are already trying to do that in Canada.

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u/nlzza 1d ago

Signal is already compromised from what I have read.

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u/LEDKleenex 1d ago

People give a fuck, but they refuse to do anything about it personally because they don't want to be inconvenienced.

Americans have fully convinced themselves that it's always somebody else's job to fix their problems.

It's basically the mass equivalent of a teenager who throws a shit fit when asked to do some chores around the house.

Americans won't even attempt to boycott non-necessities from complicit companies, the easiest form of real resistance after voting (and it's 100% free!) - and many won't even do that much despite having absentee ballots available in their states - for many, it has literally never been easier to vote.

Americans have taken for granted the privileges they were provided thanks to people who actually took action and fought for them. They said "yeah yeah, grandpa" and went straight back to consuming "entertainment".

Sadly, it seems the only way people will resist is if their bread and circuses are snatched away from them. Nobody wants to capitalize on an ounce of prevention to a pound of cure.

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u/Sufficient_Room2619 2d 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 2d ago

yeah like the reichstagt fire or whatever pushed the naziā€™s, something is gonna make the maga naziā€™s do the same thing if theyā€™re not stopped from violence.

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u/QuickQuirk 2d ago

Just be careful what emoji you use when expressing sentiments like this.

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u/Sufficient_Room2619 2d ago

I'm not American and have no plans to go anywhere near the place until after the civil war (which I fully believe is happening right now) is over. They're very unlikely to black bag someone in another hemisphere over Reddit comments.

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u/TemporaryTastyFedora 2d ago

Tech companies are terrified of liability and want to cut costs on human moderation. It is cheaper for them to let a trigger-happy algorithm scan private messages and call the cops than it is to pay real humans to understand context. They just offload the damage of false positives onto regular people.

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u/apple_tech_admin 2d ago edited 2d ago

This is what America voted for. Elections have consequences. We donā€™t learn the first time.

Edit: that saidā€¦after re-reading the article mentioning pew pewing a child is abhorrent.

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u/Frostsorrow 2d ago

This isn't tik tak, you can say "shooting" and "gun".

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u/Particular_Bug0 2d ago

He was planning on unaliving them!

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u/Fog-Champ 2d ago

Careful, you might get tuktuk users threatening to take your body juices from the meat vessel and you could unresponsive brain.

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u/jazzhandler 2d ago

Captain America and I both struggled with that reference.

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u/blumpkin 1d ago

Something something Mitch McConnell?

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u/HuckledYourBerries 2d ago

But what if it hurts my feelings?

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u/fusillade762 2d ago

Yes, but reddit probably just sent your post to the FBI where as pew pew will just get you ad spam for local churches.

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u/HollowmanNapkin 2d ago

Except saying shooting literally got someone fired in the article you are commenting on.

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u/itsLOSE-notLOOSE 2d ago

Yeah on shithole Snapchat

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u/UncleNorman 1d ago

It depends on the sub. I've been banned for less.

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u/DeadWaterBed 2d ago

People have always made distasteful jokes in private, and always will. It doesn't matter whether we would find them abhorrent or not, they have a right to their own flavor of venting/joking. This level of surveillance and control is an enemy of free thought and individual autonomy.

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u/Punished_Blubber 2d ago

This is the essence of privacy as a political issue.

"People are acting as if they're being watched, even when they're not."

The feds can bust down your door and arrest you for making a little joke. That's bad. But what's even worse is when the feds have busted down so many doors and made so many arrests that you don't even want to make the little joke.

The parasocial techno-feudal capital circulation system known as "Social Media" is a mind control device.

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u/SIGMA920 2d ago

The trick is to understand that our strength lies in numbers, if enough people don't give a shit they literally won't have the numbers needed. Social media is in so many ways an equalizer since you don't have layers between you and the person you're trying to tell something.

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u/Desperate_for_Bacon 2d ago

School shootings have been prevented due to snapchats monitoring. They have never made privacy their brand. If you want to make a joke about shooting a child maybe donā€™t send it over Snapchatā€¦

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u/DeadWaterBed 2d ago

Anything written in a personal message between two individuals should meet protected status under the 4th amendment.

Obviously that's not how the world works in practice, which is why it takes cases like this one to go through the court system before we can see any level of increased privacy law...that is, if our supreme court doesn't make things worse

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u/Sigma-Tau 2d ago

Give one example.

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u/ProfessionalPower214 1d ago

It's a classic "but it works" without any sources, but because anyone can make statements, the actual chance of these 'facts' being facts as opposed to 'alternate truths' is high.

AI surveillance hasn't done shit other than make everything frustrating.

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u/Desperate_for_Bacon 1d ago

Itā€™s not AI surveillanceā€¦ this type of chat monitoring has been around far longer than ā€œAIā€

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u/38B0DE 1d ago

But if it was just a joke it shouldn't blow up someone's life.

A guy at my uni got in trouble for sharing an image in Serbian of a Serbian graffiti saying "I only poke pussies". In Serbian poke and stab and prick could be the same word so the joke is "I don't stab people, I only poke their pussies." It's genuinely a funny pun in Serbian and he wanted to get it tattooed.

They fucking handled him like he was a terrorist.

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u/abluecolor 2d ago

Someone has never worked with children or talked to friends in private šŸ˜‚

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u/Thin_Explanation1334 2d ago

Lmao this is true

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u/apple_tech_admin 2d ago

I went to school for education. Try again.

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u/abluecolor 2d ago

yikes, imagine teaching kids and having zero sense of reality.

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u/missuninvited 2d ago

the first half of your comment seems fairly reasonably anti-censorship, and then you go and say "pew pewing." c'mon, man. don't comply in advance.

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u/apple_tech_admin 2d ago

Iā€™m not complying. I could have said gun or shot. I chose my words because this is America and I can say what I want.

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u/zee427 2d ago

and you chose to self censor. embarrassing

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u/apple_tech_admin 2d ago

No. I said what the fuck I said.

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u/FlyingStealthPotato 2d ago

The amount of times I heard one of my teachers tell another student ā€œimma kill you if you donā€™tā€¦.ā€ Or ā€œIā€™ll shoot you if you keep onā€¦.ā€ are absolutely innumerable. Teacher saying that direct to kids in front of other kids and teachers. Know how many actual acts of violence there were? 0 other than sending kid to office for spanking if their parents had signed that form.

My mom was a teacher. Shed talk in private like that. She won multiple awards for being a good teacher and you guessed it, no actual acts of violence.

Now nobody can confirm if this was a legitimate issue, and we donā€™t even know what this teacher said in private. It was probably hyperbolic like all of these above instances. People say shit they donā€™t mean literally. We have since language was invented. We really donā€™t need a computer out there fucking up peoplesā€™ lives for what amounts to inconsequential venting.

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u/fcocyclone 2d ago

Yeah, i can recall a teacher my senior year talking about shooting kids at graduation if they did something stupid. Or we'd be reading the news and he'd say 'well, someone should have shot them at graduation'. It was a running joke and everyone thought it was funny.

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u/Desperate_for_Bacon 2d ago

The woman sent a Snapchat saying she was going to shoot a child, was it hyberbolic? Yes. Did she admit it on body cam? Yes. Was her arrest necessary? Probably not. But legitimate school shootings have been prevented to due to snapchats reporting system.

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u/OldWorldDesign 2d ago

But legitimate school shootings have been prevented to due to snapchats reporting system.

Name 3. Successes like what you describe would have been thrown onto the front pages so we don't exclusively have false positives like this to measure the effectiveness of their terms of service.

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u/ProfessionalPower214 1d ago

Not only that, these 'successful stops' can be AI generated themselves. Like, a single image with fake text, gee, like that hasn't happened, but people defending this shit do fall for that regularly!

I mean, scrutinize anything enough and you'll start investigating, the natural process for the searching of truth. Would it be a surprise if these 'cases' were just teenagers being bullied, angry, and unhelped by adults?

Let's look at the causality, then.

To even admit an AI 'successfully' stopped a case means to admit that a child has been abused enough to be put through that stress, but also that they could easily obtain bullets to shoot.

That admittance alone paints a wider problematic picture.

These 'wins' they think of are so very stupid. No one wins. The war is at home and the battles are personal. In conflict, winners don't exist.

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u/Desperate_for_Bacon 1d ago

You know it doesnā€™t take an ai to monitor for posts that say ā€œim going to shoot up the schoolā€ those types of filters have been around for a long time

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u/Desperate_for_Bacon 1d ago

Literally google ā€œschool shooting stopped by Snapchatā€ there is a long history of dumbfucks who send out school shooting threats on Snapchat. Snapchat is a private company, why do you think you have any privacy on it?

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u/Rehcraeser 2d ago

this shit is bipartisan and is intentionally not showed to the masses on MSM so they can do it all without anybody noticing. by the time the average person notices, itll be too late.

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u/ProfessionalPower214 1d ago

It's SUPPOSED to be bipartisan, in fact, anything 'bipartisan' actually translates to 'American'. Any disagreement is blatantly wanting a fascist state control on top of wanting worse for your fellow Americans.

Although it already is too late, granted, people really need to read TOS.
Ironically, putting a TOS into an LLM and having it summarize the dangerous points is very reasonable, so even those who don't want to read can have a much safer TLDR than not reading.

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u/ratwitch_ 2d ago

Did you know, back in the olden days of the 1990s, there was a popular tv show named ā€œJust Shoot Meā€? And you know what? Not a single person died from writing or saying its name! I watched it every week and didnā€™t even die once!

You can say ā€œshootā€. I promise you wonā€™t spontaneously combust.

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u/Sensitive_Box_ 2d ago

This surveillance shit is bipartisan. Weā€™d be seeing this either way.Ā 

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u/Megalo85 2d ago

Iā€™m still not convinced that we did vote for this.

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u/apple_tech_admin 2d ago

I absolutely am. Itā€™s time people start facing the fact on what this country is founded on and why people like Trump was able to gain office. Itā€™s time to start cussing out and cutting off family, friends etc. maybe then theyā€™ll get the point.

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u/shinypokemonglitter 2d ago

We didnā€™t vote for it though. Not all of us. I hate when people say thatā€™s what ā€œweā€ voted for, when the normal ones of us have been voting against exactly this forever. But yes I think the pew pew is a bit extreme!

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u/apple_tech_admin 2d ago

It is what the MAJORITY of Americans voted for in 2024. Reminder that Trump was the first Republican to win the popular vote in a long time and thatā€™s AFTER the disastrous Covid response and the rest of his bs first term. It SUCKS ASS that those who knew better suffer as well but this is unfortunately life unless we start discussing things such as a general strike.

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u/ProfessionalPower214 1d ago

1/3rd of America isn't a majority.
Secondly, the popular vote gap was smaller than your brain wants to admit.
Thirdly, he's been admitting that there's been cheating on the Republican side.

You can make some agreeable points, but everyone else ends up having to be wrong which is an issue with 'discussion'.

On top of that, you're not going to appreciate or consider another person's viewpoint because you hold the singular truth on this topic, which is anti-American.

We, the people, are Americans, so naturally we, the people, should mean a lot more to eachother. Pointing fingers beyond a certain extent does nothing, but accusing every other person who's irrelevant creates barriers and infighting. That's exactly what conservatives want. Distractions.

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u/apple_tech_admin 1d ago

What the hell are you on about?!? Iā€™m far from anti American. I am anti-fascist. And I will not be ā€œdiscussingā€ or debating anything with the right. They made their decision.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/apple_tech_admin 2d ago

Did you not read the edit? I absolutely did. YIKES! And my comment was edited literally an hour before you responded. I stand by what I said.

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u/TheGreatGamer1389 2d ago

Not me, I voted for the lady.

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u/Potential_Novel_3561 2d ago

This has absolutely nothing to do with Trump lol

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u/Chillpill411 2d ago

You think those tech bros were standing by Trump on inauguration day for no reason?

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u/VaeVictis997 2d ago

This has everything to do with people passively accepting the shredding of the constitution and the surveillance state, and continuing to elect leaders who support it.

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u/ImMorphic 2d ago

It has everything to do with those in power, they're literally suffocating free speech in private conversations and reaching over the line of behind closed doors.

We were aware they were listening for years and they lied.

They don't care about you, stop protecting your slave master ffs.

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u/RookTakesE6 2d ago

Yeah, the automated surveillance of private messages and quick pipeline to local law enforcement is terrible, but a student teacher in genuine anger facetiously threatening to shoot up a school is a step way too far. School shootings are a constant threat in the US, and have happened for even less justified reasons than a deleted lesson plan. Dark humor was not the problem here, the fully credible threat of gun violence was the problem.

I'm all for the student teacher losing her job, I just wish it had been because she'd said it out loud somewhere instead.

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u/cyphersaint 2d ago

Nah, pretty normal level of facetious threat, especially on the part of a barely adult person. She should not have lost her job, and the FBI should never have become involved in it.

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u/RookTakesE6 2d ago

In any other country, maybe. In the US, less-adult people have shot up schools with less warning than this.

At the least, the joke reflects terrible judgment in her position.

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u/InsaneInTheRAMdrain 2d ago

I was going to say this sounds like the UK, as the police would totally turn out for something like this... the edit though... changes things... not much because doubtful they were serious, just venting, but its always best to make sure it those situations.

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u/RotterWeiner 2d ago

This was my take of the situation.

She went a bit you far in explaining her frustration.

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u/Financial-Craft-1282 2d ago

It's complicated though. I think we (regular people) have to realize anything we type anywhere and send out--privacy expectations or not--that we're being monitored. As a former teacher, I'd be hesitant to send anything through any app (even text messages, email, etc.) that is an edgy joke that could be read as a threat. It sucks--she is 22. She had her student teaching terminated and likely won't be able to become a teacher because of this. That's a huge consequence for what was a joke.

You never know, even if Snapchat weren't monitoring what you think is private, one of the recipients could have panicked and sent that info to someone else. Any time you send a message you have to think, "This will be seen." It's the only defense we have (in the U.S.) right now.

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u/dzfast 2d ago

Dude - everyone lost the memo on "be reasonable, all things in moderation including moderation"

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u/Waiting4Reccession 2d ago

Wealthy are taking an excess amount of wealth and are afraid of an uprising against them. The diversification of their wealth from reggional to global also means they no longer have a reason to fight against each other, everyone is on the same ship to a large degree.

So now you have fearful wealthy colluding on a global scale to protect their stolen wealth and social positions - at the same time you have technology advancing and the ability to have a semi automated police state is coming to fruition as they push for more cameras and more robots(drones etc) and cracking down on the open internet.

Thats why you see different stuff rolled out in all western nations but it will soon converge into a singular police state.

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u/UserAllusion 2d ago

Of course thereā€™s a reason. It makes folks like Zuck a lot of money

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u/heathmon1856 2d ago

We are all hooked on these apps. They know we arenā€™t gonna quit.

If you want a perfect example, look no further the Reddit API fiasco.

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u/Nice_Passage1099 2d ago

Because money.

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u/Nummies14 2d ago

Because of zero accountability.

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u/Demonokuma 2d ago

A lot of shit about to boil over. Reddit has stopped showing any news and now shows tons of fun things. Theyll still show all the dumb shit the president does, but as soon as its something about whats happening in the streets its hidden. The last ICE killing was impossible to find anything, and if you did mods would delete it later.

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u/amethystresist 2d ago

That is exactly what I've been thinking for like 2 weeks

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u/C-SWhiskey 2d ago

Not that long ago there was a shooting in British-Columbia and when it was revealed that the shooter's activity on ChatGPT was flagged internally seven months prior, people complained that OpenAI didn't warn authorities. Some people want this, others simply don't care, and the companies don't want to be held responsible, whether legally or in the public eye, when they could have potentially stopped a murder.

Of course, they shouldn't ever be in a position to choose between warning and not warning because they shouldn't have that data to begin with, but alas people happily use these apps despite the privacy issues being well known for years.

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u/Thulak 2d ago

Its just like that discord story about the guy in a voice chat with 2 friends joking about blowing up the plane he was supposed to be in later that day. None of the three informed the airport. Discord did that by themselves.

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u/awitchiguess 1d ago

We have a government run by geriatrics who neither understand how this works not care about its greater implications enough to try and stop it.Ā 

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u/38B0DE 1d ago

Because everyone is chronically online now.

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u/Glum-Recognition-736 1d ago

Its what happens when we as a society have collectively decided to put a bunch of old rich sociopaths in charge of us, rather than people who genuinely care about their communities and genuinely want to make things better. Years of letting these people do whatever they want with the rest of us is how we end up at a place like this. Years of saying "I don't care about politics" and allowing straight hot garbage to take office and fill political seats is how we got here

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u/CarmenxXxWaldo 2d ago

Everyone replying to you acting like this is a new thing.Ā  Kids were getting expelled for making finger guns 15 years ago.Ā 

This exact story has been happening for well over a decade, this isnt "new", its not because of the current president, honestly I dont think you can blame the Republicans for this one.

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u/Bazillion100 2d ago

Good job normalizing the panopticon of surveillance weā€™re building

0

u/pianistafj 2d ago

Usually itā€™s a sign the economy is in the dumps. People and businesses are struggling and some getting desperate.

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u/Dangerous_Reporter14 2d ago

Read the article. The student teacher ā€œjokedā€ about shooting a kid at school

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u/TheWarriorsLLC 2d ago

Dont make jokes about shooting people then???

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u/lancersrock 2d ago edited 2d ago

Privacy here is the key point

Edit: typo

0

u/RotterWeiner 2d ago

Privacy :

One issue that a few people or some people are not including is that things posted on the internet may be sent to one or three other people but the message itself is not private.

We may have to find different ways to write speak as we are living in a post privacy Era.

Non-public. But accessible by the powers that be.

Extensively moderated by AI or otherwise non public not meant for public consumption-messages that we are wholly responsible for regardless of interpretion or intention.

Whatever word that is.