Not sure what’s worse here: how the police overreacted or that the software immediately contacts law enforcement, without letting teachers (n.b.: they are the professionals here, not the police) go through the positives first.

The idea behind the policy is to stop school shootings. If there were a legitimate threat of violence, you would likely want the police to be notified as soon as possible. The issue here is that the authorities are letting a piece of half-ass code (Read: AI) decide what is a legitimate threat and, worse still, acting on that determination without question.

They have literally sacrificed an essential freedom for some temporary, and probably illusory, security.

Something tells me that our type of jokes are on the way out bro. As you said, there's no room for nuance in this story, so I'm afraid we'll eventually all be listened in on 100% of the time until someone says something 'actionable'.
If you're not already on a multitude of lists by now, you're doing something wrong.

Authorities be like "aww shoot, not again."

In a country weary of school shootings, several states have taken a harder line on threats to schools. Among them is Tennessee, which passed a 2023 zero-tolerance law requiring any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement.

The 13-year-old girl arrested in August 2023 had been texting with friends on a chat function tied to her school email at Fairview Middle School, which uses Gaggle to monitor students’ accounts.

1. how to teach kids to be a good corpo zombie. On corporate/school chat you don’t chat otherwise you are sent to camp/prison /fired
2. all of that monitoring for school shooting! What about banning gun that will be cheaper but yeah no ai software monitoring

Snapchat’s automated detection software picked up the comment, the company alerted the FBI, and the girl was arrested on school grounds within hours.

Someone should tell the kids about Signal.

As for monitoring on school computers, that seems OK to me if it's disclosed to the students and parents in advance. What's problematic is the responses, which seem much more focused on ass-covering than student welfare. I imagine most 13 year olds have made jokes about killing people once or twice and any adult with common sense would be able to tell they're jokes.

the policy is to stop school shootings

You should try Europe once. It's more fun than your 3rd world country.

This is an ass-covering response to school shootings, because some of the shooters have expressed their intent before.

A strip search obviously isn't necessary even if it's a credible threat; a metal detector wand and basic pat down is more than enough to ensure someone doesn't have a gun. This wasn't a credible threat though, and a chat with the school counselor would have been the right way to handle this.

This is frustrating. Obviously it's not okay to make jokes like that and I even think some sort of punishment might be okay, but strip searching and jailing her overnight? You aren't creating someone who will think before they speak, you're making someone who will be paranoid of all legal processes and never trust any government official ever again for anything because they got fucking STRIP SEARCHED AND DETAINED OVERNIGHT over a really shitty joke.

I just want to point out a lot of you actively support this if it helps curb “hate speech” or fascists or nazis or whatever. But what can be used against the guilty may be used against the innocent so it is best that we do not allow it at all. Either all speech is free or none of it is, there’s no other way.

Murica

Oh, I'm with you on that. I'm just pointing out the thought behind the policy, however flawed. I've been to Europe many years ago. I would love to be there now, except that as an American I would be rightly ostracized.

Man, if only there was a good way to stop school shooting

Alas, one can only dream

To me this is equivalent to dropping bombs on the Middle East and expecting not to create a lot more terrorists. If she didn’t want to go shooting before maybe she wants to now.

Dream? Not in an American school you don't. You need to stay alert and be ready to "RUN, HIDE, FIGHT" at any moment.

“It made me feel like, is this the America we live in?”

Some people are really fucking ignorant.

You know what really grinds my gears? This shitty dystopia completely eschews any potentially cool aspect of invasive exploitative authoritarianism. The (not so) secret police is patching together their own "uniforms" by browsing the bargain bins at the local tacti-cool mall-ninja outfitters. Where's the black leather trench coats, stylish sunglasses worn after dark and slicked back hair? If they're going to ask me for 'ze papers' all the time, the least they can do is look cool doing it, godamnit. At least get Hugo Boss to design your attire; that's just about the only thing that worked out well for the last bunch of pricks.

I mean, where's the towering brutalist architecture? Where's my mandatory daily dose of SOMA? Or my idiotically wirelessly hackable cyberware? Hell, they can't even do bread and circuses right anymore. The bread is CO2-pumped flour glue and the circuses is an endless stream of more Marvel projects and Disney violations of Star Wars.

And don't get me started on the quality of our dictators these days. They sure don't make them like they used to.

The US will do anything and everything except try proper gun control

I didn’t realize the schools were using Run, Hide, Fight. That is the same policy for hospital staff in the event of an active shooter. Maddening.

Unsurprising to me this is happening in schools, they've got to be ready for the low wage retail jobs many will have after graduation. A lot of places have been upgrading their phones to Zoom-enabled devices, which have the ability to record and summarize all employee conversations held near them for management or HR. I've worked in a couple places recently where it got rolled out and there were hints they were using it that way.

Anyone willing to call me paranoid, or supportive of the idea this tech is used this way or will be, please respond, retail isn't really full of many tech savvy people and I'm curious if I'm imagining the capability/use of this, or if others have had similar experiences.

I'm sorry, in hospitals? Where a significant portion of the residents can do none of those things?