this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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I fully agree with how all of this is authoritarian bullshit but I can't escape that nagging feeling that this too is about the US, the only country in the world where these shootings are daily occurrences; I get that people get ichy about even jokes like these
And yet, if the US cares so much how come it doesn't take more comprehensive steps to prevent them?
It's only ever invasions of privacy to feed directly to law enforcement. And they won't even enter the building to confront active shooters.
I fear that we are training our population to suppress the signs, to just "go off" without warnings. If we deploy SWAT every time somebody repeats some violent threat joke they heard in 785 movies and TV shows over the past 20 years, people are going to get better at filtering that - and actual signs that they're about to "go postal."
As for that, what happens when I'm watching some indie movie from a DVD that Alexa doesn't recognize and Alexa hears the character in the movie plotting to do some (better not say it here in detail) very plausible copycat of something like Timothy McVeigh and his little truck bomb? Alexa mistakes that audio snippet for actual people in the house and reports it...
Big tech is complicit, no one should be using their products
I admit, as an outsider looking in, I am a bit surprised how many people are okay with these jokes.
It's just a joke until it isn't, and then it isn't so funny. However, I do get that it can literally just be a joke and nothing more, but I do have a hard time compartmentalizing it like that.
With that said, just like anyone else here, I'm not really a fan of mass surveillance either so I obviously feel conflicted.
Here's the thing. It's an off color joke. Snapchat didn't report her "master plan" to smuggle weapons into the school.
It reported what was essentially a private vent session from a woman who is young enough to have lived through a lot of the security theater of the active shooter drills happening in schools across the US to this day.
It would be like a boomer or perhaps Gen X'r making a joke about bomb shelters.
Or a millennial making jokes about suicide or bomb threats (both of which are things a lot of millennials actually have made jokes about).
Is it a cool thing to say in mixed company? No. But she wasn't saying it in mixed company. She was talking to her boyfriend. She had the expectation that it was a private conversation.
It's extremely likely that she wouldn't have made the same joke if she had known it wasn't private.
In any case though, you don't have to be okay with the joke to see that this is basically an algorithmic invasion of someone's expected privacy and that is an overstep in the name of security that actually violates privacy for security theatre.
You mean to tell me they can scramble a whole FBI team in less than an hour for a "terroristic threat" that isn't even viable, but they let all those kids get shot in Uvalde?
There have been multiple active shooters who actually posted manifestos online before they committed the acts and those guys didn't get a visit from the FBI in full riot gear.
How many people do you know who have made a joke about killing their boss? When I was in the Navy, Marines used to deliberately make dead baby jokes for the shock value. It's not okay, but it is a fact that it happens and that's unlikely to change.
usa is "paranoid" about that, but still most people see no problem about having a pedo-rapist as a country chairman, and wiping civilians using drones and missiles in war that mentioned before chairman started.
Most people? I think you should reconsidering your definition of "most people".