this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
997 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
86922 readers
4312 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
She said she was going to shoot the student and/or the school. Snapchat did the right thing. She is not the victim here.
Wanting(venting) frustration is not school shootings. Your "Justice" system is broken and your government spies massively on you.
Edit: not wanting but venting.
Saying you want to shoot students or the school should not be ignored. If you were the parent of the student, would your preferred course of action is do nothing?
The amount of times I said I was going to kill my sister in my life would have gotten me arrested if the government were listening to me. Anyone who knows me knows I love my sister, and would obviously never kill her. Hyperbole is frequently used in all aspects of human communication, and anyone who says it should be grounds for investigation is either lying, or stupidly believes that those in power could ever be trusted with such privileges.
I can relate to that. But that is very different than sharing you want to shoot an unrelated (biological) student or the school.
Would you prefer if all serious threats on social media were ignored?
Ah yes, the old, "any act of state surveillance is acceptable as long as it in theory could increase the safety of children by the width of a single electron."
This is what the country that was founded on "give me liberty or give me death" has degenerated into.
I'm fine with monitoring Snapchat and actioning death threats. Not sure if you caught this part, but its AI that monitors looking for death threats, not humans.
You are advocating for the death of children.
The policies you support will, on net, kill far more children than they save. These inevitably have an extremely high false-positive rates. For every one actual school shooter you catch, you end up ruining the lives of a thousand innocent children. Many of those will have their lives completely disrupted, many dying early deaths of from suicide and drug overdose.
You are are advocating for the death of children.
That's a stretch. Your conjecture isn't supported by the facts of this story whatsoever.
The issue with surveillance is that it relies on the assumption that the people with the privilege to access the information are honorable enough to only use it when necessary and only use it truthfully. I don't trust our country or corporations not to have an AI "hallucinate" a death threat so that they have reasonable cause to detain anyone they want whenever they want.
Plus, I didn't really think it's all that different between my sister and I and a teacher and their students. My wife was a teacher, and while she never said she wanted to shoot a student, she's certainly said she wanted to strangle one. Most of the other teachers I know have said similarly violent things. I also used to work with doctors, and they often say similar things as well.
People with tough jobs often release stress with violent candid statements about things that frustrate them, then go on to obviously never actually do anything violent. Again, it's called hyperbole, and is a very common thing across all language. Even if this AI was completely infallible and couldn't be used dishonestly, it would still have so many false positives that it would be nothing more than a boy who cried wolf.
You are describing a policy failing, not technology. I think we can both agree the policy side of things is sorely lacking. Circumstances where people are detained because of AI reporting without ever looking at the evidence themselves just shouldn't happen.
Try the hyperbole 'Is there a bomb in my suitcase? What do you think, I would put it in a checked bag?" I'm sure the hilarity will be overwhelming.
What I'm describing is our current reality where policies are enacted for "safety" when really they're to be abused. The news calls them "bad actors" or "rogue officers" but anyone who doesn't see them as the expected results they are is fooling themselves. Stories like this are to normalize a system specifically being designed to vilify normal people instead of our actual enemies.
We can't have a discussion about what a moral government would do with surveillance until we have a moral government. It's so far from happening that the idea that it will ever be used to provide more good than bad is concernedly naive.
I'm not saying we shouldn't take threats of violence seriously, I'm saying that a person's private communications should never be publicly available, regardless of what dangers might go undiscovered, because the real danger of such a policy being misused overshadows that risk by orders of magnitude.
I completely agree there are abuses. But outlawing the technology doesn't change the mindset of law enforcement. In my opinion, we put pressure on lawmakers to make it criminal to abuse this power. We still protect the vulnerable, and our privacy is protected.
Considering its AI reviewing the texts and not humans, general privacy isn't compromised. Again, let's deal with the real issue which is abuse of power.
...our president is a criminal who deserves to be in jail, but isn't. Lawmakers themselves obviously can't be trusted with this, either. I'd trust a random person off the street more than anyone in the government.
You have the upcoming elections to make a difference. Hopefully the Democrats don't shoot themselves in the foot.
Well, elections and the second amendment, yeah. Hopefully we can build a world where a policy can be made for good that actually does good, but we'll see.
Yes the fuck it should if it was said in a private message to close friends.
You wanna open up your DMs on every platform for people to fish through? I'm sure we can find a few things you've said that the majority of people would agree aren't ok things to say.