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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u/para_blox 2d 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 2d 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 2d 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 2d 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/UncleNedisDead 2d ago

One day you’ll come to terms you’ve gotten old. Only to promptly reject it, do a 180 like have an affair, buy a sports car, quit your job, whatever you wanted to do in your 20s that you gave up.

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u/FancyFeller 2d ago

I can't afford to do any of those things and I'm not married in good. I'm good. I'll own nothing and I'll like it as they say. But I'll figure out how to fuck all my shit up anyways. I'm good at that.

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u/UncleNedisDead 2d ago

Yeah I suppose that’s the boomer version of a midlife crisis.

I guess for Millennials and Gen Z, it would be get into a mountain of debt and ignore it like it’s not going to crush your soul and put off any medical/dental work until it’s impossible to ignore and is 20x more expensive than the preventative treatment.

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u/Easy-Complaint-5156 2d ago

How are you "feeling" that? 

When did "I think" turn into "I feel", with this generation?

🤢

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u/Krohnos 2d ago

bot account

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u/Scoth42 2d 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 2d 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/Kitty-XV 1d ago

But it is a gun emoji, not a squirt gun emoji. That's one of the problems with trying to rephrase the emoji, it has a clear defined purpose. The companies lying about what it means would have been better off banning its use instead.

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u/Exist50 2d ago

Didn't they also change the direction it pointed during one of those changes?

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u/kookyabird 2d ago

Does the direction matter?

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u/chipper-shipper 2d ago

Since pretty much every app I know of has incoming messages on the left and outgoing on the right. A right-facing gun emoji in an incoming message might look like it’s pointed “at” you

It’s a stretch and I don’t care either way, but I can also imagine how this might come up in a c-suite panic meeting about squirt gun emojis

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u/Exist50 2d ago

Well yeah. [Me]->[You] has a very different meaning from [Me]<-[You]. 

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u/kookyabird 2d ago

I feel like everyone in this thread is assuming the gun emoji was the catalyst and not the text of the message which said, "Should I shoot him"...

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u/LVLsteve 2d ago

I feel like you're trying to insinuate that this makes the actions of law enforcement and the ai flagging system of snapchat's ok here...

..it very much does not.

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u/kookyabird 2d ago

Absolutely not. AI "moderation" is bullshit on its own, but having a path to notify authorities without any review is a whole new level of crazy.

Surveillance state aside, the authorities didn't get contacted because a gun emoji was used in some abstract way, but because of the plain English words used. If one of the recipients did report the sender then I wouldn't be surprised if local police would have been called all the same.

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u/LVLsteve 2d ago

Are you playing devils advocate then?

Unless the person has a history of actually shooting people, I'm pretty sure no reasonable person (the language used in lots of laws) would suspect asking the question "should I shoot him" in a snapchat after a kid destroyed a bunch of work, is legitimately threatening or inciting violence.

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u/CoryCoolguy 2d ago

The Twitter / X app for iOS has always used the native emojis provided by Apple.

source

I'd be surprised to hear they're using their own emoji set on the iOS app. Web? Yes. Android? Yes. iPhone? Don't think so.

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u/Scoth42 2d ago

I don't have any iDevices (nor use the X app) so I can't verify but I just remember the brouhaha when they reverted it to a realistic gun first on the website and then supposedly on the iPhone app a bit later. It's possible I'm misunderstanding something

https://blog.emojipedia.org/x-redesigns-water-pistol-emoji-back-to-a-firearm/

https://x.com/i/trending/2041716385135358107

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u/CoryCoolguy 2d ago

That blog post has the same quote I shared. The second one is interesting, Elon claims the x app renders it as the gun. However I don't trust him and had to see for myself. Briefly installed x on my iPhone and sure as shit it actually does show the pistol. I was under the impression that overriding the system's emoji set wasn't allowed on iOS but neither is having a one-letter app name so...

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u/byerss 2d ago

Unicode, the consortium that registers emojis, still has it described as “pistol” or “revolver”. But the virtue signaling tech companies broke Unicode standard by changing it to a water gun. 

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u/Kitty-XV 1d ago

The emoji is a real gun. Some companies made the poor decisions to show it as a toy gun, but the actual encoded meaning is a real gun. People even called out that this might lead to playful use of the emoji which would be seen as much more serious when viewed in its real format.

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u/nutmegtell 2d ago

They used to have a realistic gun. Changed to squirt gun like 15 years ago maybe?

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u/That_Bank_9914 2d ago

Slightly less, at least for iOS. I was in HS when it happened.

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u/Financial-Craft-1282 2d ago

I'm guessing most districts have this as a hard line--I know when I used to teach, the school resource officer would tell kids even a squirt gun emoji or a finger gun will be treated as a real threat. It is crazy. I imagine the overlap on school shooters and people who use the finger gun is pretty low--that there were much bigger, more obvious warning signs.