There is something fundamentally fucked up in a country that arrests and puts in jail a 13 years old kid over a bad joke.

Holy shit, the amount of surveillance the teens are under is ungodly and people blame the chatbot? And there wasn't even a human kind enough to speak with the girl before calling the fucking cops? I see a lot of blame to place here, but it's not the chatbot who is to blame.

• The kids for bullying her for her tan
• The school boards implementing the surveillance
• The parents who allowed such surveillance in the first place
• The person screening what was flagged for not sending the school counselor to talk with the kid
• The person calling the cops
• The cops for arresting an 8th-grader and DOING A STRIP SEARCH AND KEEPING HER OVERNIGHT WTF instead of handing her over to her parents

Everyone of them failed a 13 year old girl. All of them should be ashamed.

Arrested and strip-searched for a first offense? That's fucking ridiculous. I hope the lawsuit succeeds. It's the only peaceful tool we have to curb over-zealous law enforcement.

Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says.

Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her “Mexican,” even though she’s not. When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”

Students who think they are chatting privately among friends often do not realize they are under constant surveillance

This is the problem

My sense of humor is dry, dark, and absurdist. I’d go to jail every week for the sorts of things I joke about if I was a kid today. This is complete lunacy.

Example of an average joke on my part: speed up and run over that old lady crossing the street!

It makes my partner laugh. I laugh. We both know I don’t mean it. But a crappy AI tool wouldn’t understand that.

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

Another school shooting avoided! Just kidding, we just tortured a child for fun.

I can't say for certain because I wasn't given one but I can't imagine me and my friends would have been willing to communicate with each other on devices provided by our school. Even in the early 00s it would have been filled with spyware.

Lots of wannabe authoritarians out there in educationland.

All those decades that the schools just -couldn't afford- more (well-educated) teachers and smaller class sizes. Lots of low-end look-good.

And then along came tech, and lo-and-behold, IT was going to be the savior. Let's buy into that! We may not be able to teach them to read, write or think, but they can learn to kneel!

Talking about online privacy has become the “safe sex talk” of the last decade or so. You have to keep reminding kids so that it sticks. Nothing you say online is private, it can all be copied/screengrabbed/recorded/photographed and shared by the recipient. What you say, any images you post, etc. On school or work devices they can essentially see most everything, nothing is private. Even if you make efforts to cover your tracks, a truly determined agency with enough resources likely will find out who you are if they want to.

More free child labor in jails.

What a great way to prepare students for our AI enabled social media and digital surveillance society. Take note kids, trust no one!

The whole trend of teens rejecting phones for dumbphones is making sense now. If you can't fight big mainstream technology, then fuck big mainstream technology!

I didn’t know Reddit admins were also school admins

The world is turning into one giant shitty customer service experience.

What is sad is that an environment like this ruins someone’s mental health and ironically increasing the overall risk of violence.

The next few years is going to be like the time Post Office employees were hounded and had their lives destroyed over what was later found to be a software fault and not mass Human corruption, but on a far grander scale.

This is also why (I think) that younger people don't like going outside. Cameras are everywhere. There's no privacy. We've become a world of creeps. Not really for the most of us. But if I was 10 years old I'd think everyone as creeps.

Now corporations are forcibly creeping into the classrooms. Yuck!

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.

Thought control

“Sometimes you have to look at the trade for the greater good,” said Board of Education member Anne Costello in a July 2024 board meeting.

No no no no.

What a shithole country.

I was already glad being out of school before widespread take-home laptops and required after-school logging in to check for homework and shit, but this AI-driven surveillance is on a whole other level. Sometimes I'm wondering if it's just me getting old and doing the old people thing thinking things were better "back in the day" but is this current state not objectively worse, being monitored so much and having no way to really disconnect from school?

WTF America?

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.

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.

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

Some people are really fucking ignorant.

Gotta indoctrinate them into the surveillance state early. Gotta break them before they learn to resist.

I don't understand why she was arrested, her "threat" was obviously a joke. I guess jokes are illegal now

Do you want to badly fuck up a society? Because that is how you badly fuck up a society.

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 mean pretty stupid to write that in the schools chat app, use signal or shit just regular iMessage

Some good news here is that if they apply this to society as a whole the jails would be too full, keep saying the no-no words online!

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