Sixty minutes. That’s how long it took for a private Snapchat message to travel from Kristen Volpe’s phone to the FBI to the deputies standing in her elementary school hallway. On January 29, 2025, the 22-year-old student teacher at John L. Hensey Elementary in Washington, Illinois, vented to her boyfriend and two roommates — three people total — after a student closed her laptop mid-class and wiped her lesson plan. She referenced shooting the student or the school. She meant it as a frustrated joke. Snapchat’s algorithm didn’t get the humor.
No student reported her. No parent. No coworker. The flag was entirely automated. Snapchat’s policy permits voluntary emergency disclosures to law enforcement — no warrant required — when the platform determines imminent harm exists. The algorithm makes that initial call. Think of it like your Ring doorbell deciding to call 911 on its own, except the doorbell is reading your text messages.
When I say “in your society you can”, I don’t mean there won’t be pain. I mean it’s socially acceptable.
Some people live in societies with a significant portion of the population just blanket hating you (I mean, me and people of my views, for example) and thinking you (again, me) shouldn’t exist, because their TV tells them that and they are used to thinking that it’s moral and honest to believe what their TV says. There are people in Russia who think that voting for someone other than currently ruling party’s candidate in presidential and other elections is morally treason. You don’t even feel how far really degraded societies are from yours. There are literally people thinking that even doing what even Putin still allows them to do is treason.
There are political quasi-religions postulating that living and letting live, and also peacefully facing those you don’t agree with, and accepting that robbing others is bad, and accepting that some things are just not your business, - that all these things are impossible heresy and should be killed with fire.
And that’s a level above not presuming any civil rights. And that is a level above thinking that even talking about such is weird and not normal.
And even deeper there’s preemptive obedience, where even asking someone expecting obedience from you to express that demand before you follow it is considered disobedience and you only have yourself to blame.
After that there’s worse, like today’s jihadi Syria or emirate Afghanistan or some village in India.
There are many levels, yours is mostly envied.