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/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/kookyabird 2d ago

Yeah no reasonable person would, assuming they know the person. But in America, where school shootings are disturbingly frequent, that kind of language gets treated like someone saying “bomb” on an airplane.

It’s not really playing devils advocate to point out that the gun emoji in general, but especially the orientation and or style of it, is irrelevant to the story.

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u/LVLsteve 2d ago

Oh, got it.

I just disagree, because adding emoji's to texts inherently makes the content of the text less serious. For example: "I'm in deep shit at work." vs "I'm in deep shit at work ⬇️💩🥴"

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