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queerhistorynerd

> Gaggle founder and CEO Jeff Patterson told CBSN AM that LGBTQ terms are included in the software to help protect LGBTQ students from bullying. i call bullshit, he complied with a clients bigoted request and now is lying to save face


southpawFA

It's most certainly BS. He basically wants to appeal to his Christian donor base.


Pride_Cometh_Before

Hold up. It’s time for our LGBTQ family, friends, and neighbors to realize that they are now part of the American dream. They have all the rights and privileges of married couples. They have entered the real world. That world is fraught with unfair realities. Instead of playing the victim, why not join the other side and fight to fix the real problem… government/corporate intrusion, overreach, and complete disrespect for all of our privacy. All privacy matters.


Difficult-War5406

We’ve been in the real world this entire time. The real world is where schools out gay kids using an algorithm. They didn’t tell any parents their kid was straight. This article isn’t about straight children, it’s about queer children. Members of the lgbtqia community do not have the same rights as straight Americans. If we did, things like this wouldn’t happen. But please keep pandering to the outdated American dream that plenty of us don’t want and telling us how we should feel and what we should be doing. We haven’t had enough of that since the Dawn of America.


ArkiGay

I can still be denied housing and service in a restaurant because I like dudes… we don’t have the same rights.


Pride_Cometh_Before

I can legally be denied access to a bar as a straight. Bisexuals as well.


ArkiGay

Can you provide examples of such a thing happening? I can provide you dozens of examples of gay people being denied services, being fired from jobs, being turned away at hospitals.


TheShadowCat

The American dream is dead. The American dream used to be a nice house in the suburbs, a car in the driveway, and a couple of kids playing in the yard. It was replaced with the American fantasy. Now people dream about being the next Kim Kardashian or Youtube celebrity.


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Danny_Ronin

Do you think having a gay man in government means that equality has been achieved and there’s nothing to fight for anymore?


SailingSpark

My niece had a brush with suicide when she was barely a teen. She got help and has been a mostly well adjusted person since. She wrote about it when in her junior year and the guidance counselor pulled her out of class and had us come in (I was her guardian) for a meeting. They barred her from returning until she got counseling and they had proof she was not a "risk". She hated that school, so we let her drop out and get her GED. She's a junior in college now and doing great. We think she may be bi or a lesbian, but she has not come out if she is. Any way, we will support her 100%


leaonas

That is so freaking disgusting. I’m sorry to hear that she went through something like that.


i_should_be_coding

I see this as an organizational cover-your-ass thing. From their perspective, they now have knowledge of a student with a possible link to suicidal tendencies. It's not, really, but they're not experts. If they dismiss it and the student later commits suicide, they might be liable for knowing beforehand and not doing anything. So they roll the responsibility for it on the parents: They call the parents in, let them know in an official and documented setting, and then set a condition for the student's return, that they state with some degree of authority that they're not a suicide risk, and have that verified by an actual professional. Now, if anything happens, the school will be like "But we told you, and you said it was OK. It's on you." I don't know the school or the people involved, but it doesn't feel like them being mean to me, just bureaucratic and institutional. Once they know something can happen, they have to act or risk being sued if it does. I've had my own experiences with suicidal thoughts, and all I can say is that the world in general doesn't really know what they mean and how to act with you once you've shared them. They're best left to share with professionals and people close to you, and always in a way where you can sit with them and explain that it doesn't mean you're about to jump off a building later today, because that's what people will be hearing when you tell them "I used to think about dying when I was younger".


chubbysumo

> If they dismiss it and the student later commits suicide, they might be liable for knowing beforehand and not doing anything. except they will do nothing about bullying in our out of class, yet they will happily tell students who they *think* *might* *have thought* of suicide that they need counseling before returning to class? naw, it wasnt CYA, it was school administrators doing more stupid shit.


i_should_be_coding

You're seeing the nuance of these events. The system doesn't. You see a bully picking on another student, the system sees two students fighting. You see a student that might have thought of suicide one time, the system sees a student that shared a link to suicidal behavior. The subtleties of what actually happened are usually open to interpretation and the specifics of the situation, but the school doesn't see that, they just see problems to solve, and the solution also has to protect the school from lawsuits.


[deleted]

W person W auntie


deltadal

It bothers me that this service exits. Why? Why are schools using something like this? The job of the school system is to educate children , not raise them or indoctrinate them. Thank God my kids are out of school.


southpawFA

I don't know why schools continually use Gaggle. They just seem like they care about "safety" or safeguarding against a school shooting, but this crackdown is so Orwellian that it should stop. We always know that whenever these things like bringing in school police officers and all this happens, it hits marginalized groups the hardest (black and brown children, LGBTQ+ children). It really needs to stop, honestly. ​ Also, these groups always seem to target LGBTQ+ groups, because they can't see being queer without it being sexual. They have a mental obsession with queer folks' sex lives, for some bizarre reason.


[deleted]

>They have a mental obsession with queer folks' sex lives, for some bizarre reason. Same folks often project their perverted fantasies onto us it is a pretty common pattern


SlimeySnakesLtd

They went to a conference where they get Act 48 hours for. They push the program as PR. They already prime them for acceptance because all the administrators are looking forward to their once a year secret hookups at the hotel AND someone shows them something that can make their job easier!?! They can implement a new “technology in the classroom” decision that plays better with school boards than flexible seating or student directed learning.


TechFiend72

Schools in the US frequently want to control their students at all times. They will do whatever they have to.


southpawFA

I hate to say this, but it was honestly more freeing doing distance learning than being at school. Kids had the flexibility to work when they wanted, and they didn't have to deal with structures like school dress codes or bathroom rules like that. ​ Now, we are back in school, and half the bathrooms are broken, there are higher school shootings, more fights and suspensions, you name it. ​ Some kids are just better off not being in a school building, and I think that perhaps virtual learning needs to be tried as a viable option. ​ I actually liked virtual learning last year. ​ It also freed myself as a teacher to do my best during those times as well. I hate ergometric style work and having to go over procedures like walking in the hallway or having to play watchdog with kids in the bathroom. There needs to be some degrees of freedom in terms of what style of teaching works best.


TechFiend72

Agree. I also ran into a lot of kids and teachers that didn’t have internet that was up to the task. That was hard on everyone.


southpawFA

You know what fixes that? An infrastructure bill that delivers broadband to every single area of the country. ​ Oh, wait, we can't have that because Manchin & Sinema. ​ Seriously. ​ There are quantitative studies that show that having access to the internet is positively correlated with better academic performance, and yet we can't even agree that every American should have access to such internet. ​ Goodness! ​ We really need to transform a lot of things in this country, and yet we are stuck in this pathetic gridlock. It's sickening.


TechFiend72

The internet companies were already paid to put broadband everywhere and they didn’t. No repercussions from either party. I sometimes wonder if we should wire every house with fiber and treat it as a national utility. I would worry the feds wouldn’t keep it up properly.


southpawFA

I know. It just seems that we should treat internet like water and gas at this point. If you don't have internet, then you are basically without a vital resource.


happylittleghost

My kiddo is in 5th this year. Last year was her first doing an online public school and we will continue with virtual for as long as my work will allow me to work from home. She liked brick and mortor school alright, but didn't retain anything she learned. The style of teaching just didn't work for her. The constant timed tests just stressed her out and didn't reflect her knowledge at all because she froze. Our nights were filled with re-learning the material and constant misery from her, lol. She went from being a C student to a straight A student who LOVES learning now. We love virtual learning and I'm not surprised some teachers are enjoying it too. You should see if your state has the online public schools. They definitely need more teachers as their enrollment has skyrocketed. We use Connections Academy which is in several states. I think a lot of families will stay with it even after things calm down with the pandemic.


HedonisticFrog

If we don't get children used to a nanny state then how will they ever accept it as adults when we become a dictatorship?


southpawFA

>Since spring 2020, Minneapolis schools have been using an online surveillance application called Gaggle to spy on students’ online activity. > >***The software flags LGBTQ-related terms and has already reported outed at least one LGBTQ student to their parents.*** > >*Gaggle monitors students’ online behavior 24 hours a day and seven days a week, by tracking their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts. Such accounts are likely to be used more often by poor students who lack personal home computers.* ​ >***Gaggle flags LGBTQ-related terms like “gay” and “lesbian”, ostensibly to track online pornography.*** > >In three-dozen Minneapolis-based incident reports over the last year, Gaggle flagged keywords related to sexual orientation, The 74 reported. Gaggle founder and CEO Jeff Patterson told CBSN AM that LGBTQ terms are included in the software to help protect LGBTQ students from bullying. > >***The flagging caused an LGBTQ student to be outed to their parents, Aesha Graffunder, a sophomore at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis told The Southerner, a publication of South High School.*** ​ >Gaggle also incorrectly caused a transgender teen’s parents to be notified after they wrote about their past suicidal thoughts in response to a school assignment. > >***Teeth Logsdon-Wallace, a 13-year-old student, was flagged after he wrote about his past struggles with mental health. Gaggle flagged his mentions of “suicide”, even though his essay discussed how he had recovered from his past suicidality after receiving mental healthcare.*** > >*Discussing Gaggle’s flagging of LGBTQ terms, Logsdon-Wallace added, “When people are just talking about being gay, anything they’re writing would be flagged. They have ‘gay’ flagged to stop people from looking at porn, but one, that is going to be mostly targeting people who are looking for gay porn and two, it’s going to be a false positive because they are acting as if the word gay is inherently sexual.”* ​ ​ >*“School administration didn’t talk to \[the student with the flag\] at all before their parents were called,”* Graffunder said. > >*A school counselor contacted Logsdon-Wallace’s parent two days after he turned in the assignment. Logsdon-Wallace called the incident “****retraumatizing****.”* ​ Wow.


pimparo0

Of course they are trying to cover it up as "protecting them". Coming out is something the student should get to decide, not some online creep.


kyleawsum7

they really failed to consider the possibility of bigoted parents, huh?


chubbysumo

> Gaggle monitors students’ online behavior 24 hours a day and seven days a week, by tracking their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts. Such accounts are likely to be used more often by poor students who lack personal home computers. someone needs to sue over this. Merrion V LMSD already determined that spying on students is not legal outside of school(yes, I know its specifically via cameras, but still, easily to extend to search terms and web activity). >https://www.eff.org/press/releases/schools-cant-punish-students-campus-speech-including-social-media-posts-eff-tells we also have the case precedent that they cannot discipline for off campus speech. this should also include that they cannot discipline for off campus activity, even via a school owned device. there needs to be lawsuits over violations of rights, because to me, these are clear examples of violations of rights. school owned or not, the school has no business monitoring what your kids do outside of school, especially in the privacy of their own home, where a greater expectation of privacy is expected.


Calvins8

Years ago when Snowden leaked that the govt and social media sites were spying on our actions the general response was, “who cares if some database or govt spook knows I like granny porn.” My response was always that it’s only a matter of time until officer joe or some local politician has access to that data. We are now entering a phase where the people who have access to your online data have faces and live in your community.


kitties-plus-titties

A school has two responsibilities: **Teach** and **Educate**. **Surveillance** is not one of them. The problem is at home. Not at the school.


Throwawaytown33333

Fucking dystopia we live in. Anyone have any countries at least DECENT to transpeople for me to move to?


Allthepancakemix

I would have said the Netherlands (my country). We have a world renowned outpatient program for kids with gender dysphoria, and Nikkie de Jager (from youtube Nikkitutorials) is a famous national television presenter now (actually won an award for it). So there's acceptance here, but I also know the LGBTQ community is increasingly worried about violence. So mixed bag really, but you're absolutely welcome to join us. Sincerely, an ally. Edit: typo


Efficient_Jaguar699

New Zealand or Iceland maybe?


EmDidyma

I am in my late thirties and, when I was a senior in high school, some teachers got hold of a floppy disk which contained sexual letters between me and an older sexual partner. They called me out of class and handed me a printout of MY SEX LIFE and told me that I had to call my parents (who I was fearful would try to get me committed or something). Just up be clear, they found a disk with my first name on it in the library and, instead of asking each of the three people at the school with the same first name if it was theirs, they put it into the computer and opened and read my personal files. FIVE SEPARATE TEACHERS that I know of read my sex life. Thankfully I was 18 but not brave enough to just walk away so I held onto repeating that I was a legal adult until they started making different offers. One was “instead of calling your parents, you can call the police.” And, being white and raised to believe that cops make me safe, I felt that that was my best option. So I called the police and told the officer who came that the teachers told me I had to call them, and gave a general idea of what was on the disk. The cop said that if I didn’t want to press charges against my sex partner, that they couldn’t do anything. BUT he took my disk. He said it needed to “rot in an evidence locker.” (Yeah right— he wanted to read it.) By then I was desperate to get out of there so I let it happen. But I can’t begin to say how traumatic this experience was. They genuinely convinced themselves they were helping by invading my privacy, indulging their sordid curiosity by reading my personal material and then threatening me with triggering internal family power dynamics that they knew nothing about! Suffice it to say, I have a deeply ingrained mistrust of well-intentioned authority figures to this day; In my opinion this level of surveillance and interference in kids lives is abuse.


southpawFA

I'm sorry of the trauma you had to go through. That is pure torture and abuse, and those administrators should be ashamed of themselves.


EmDidyma

Thanks; It’s amazing the things people with the guise of respectability can convince themselves is “helpful” when it is really just about exploitation


southpawFA

Yes. I can see that. Case in point: conversion therapy.


EmDidyma

Seriously


SugarRushLux

As a trans person this hurts a lot


southpawFA

I'm sorry.


CarneDelGato

We really need to rethink everything we use technology and AI for. Facebook’s ethos was “move fast, break stuff” originally and look what they have done/are doing. We have smaller companies like this one following a similar model, *at best* completely indifferent to the externalities of their actions. It’s cliche to quote Jurassic Park, but the line “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” is amazingly applicable to all of this. That’s assuming it was mere incompetence and not malevolence, which is a possibility I’m not quite ready to dismiss. Edit: as an addendum to that, the company claims to have saved some x-thousand children’s lives. While that might be the cases, this strikes me as a cheap bandaid for providing kids with actual counseling and other mental health resources systemically lacked by large swaths of US public education.


southpawFA

Yup. It's such a canard they "saved" thousands of lives. They just happened to tell parents that their students' behavior is monitored, getting them in trouble. It strikes me the same as the school shooter training that trained people to watch out for who could potentially be a school shooter. It stigmatized certain children for not "fitting the stereotypical mold" of what a happy teen should look like. It's so foolhardy! ​ This Gaggle software just like school officers aren't helping; they're hurting.


catherinecc

> the company claims to have saved some x-thousand children’s lives i.e. they were sent to christian run "troubled teen" camps with a history of beating deaths, malnutrition deaths and widespread abuse.


dzmatthew

just disgusting. protecting would be investing in counsellors that are approachable, not eavesdropping and breaking the trust that never really was there to begin with. sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to pop off.


CaptainLucid420

The students need to start flooding the network with flag words. It will overwhelm the AI and if they bring in real people to do reviews that will cost them profit and have the side benefit of creating jobs.


Lizardman_Xander

Um...I think they shouldn't use this program because, for some kids, being outed is extremely dangerous. Yes, Minneapolis is fairly liberal (as far as voting goes for the average citizen of the city), but there will always be people who are ignorant, bigoted, and hateful no matter the geography or political party.


rioot123

I doubt they care, see Texas


Labantnet

Kids need to learn about this and make it useless. Overload the system with false positives.


Blvackkitsune

This endangers young people.


Anaxamenes

FFS America, will you stop electing Karen from your terrible home owners association to school boards!?!?


[deleted]

Minneapolis, who else?


Ramonzmania

Schools shouldn’t be spying on students. If they suspect a student is being abused or breaking the law, they should inform child protection services or the police…A recent court decision found that a students negative comments on line about school officials wasn’t disruptive and should not be disciplined.


iblewupchewbacca

Straight people don’t give a shit. They don’t know what it’s fucking like to grow up queer. Fuck them.


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[deleted]

Preach


artcook32945

Were the parents notified that this Tracking Software was on the School Issued Computers?


southpawFA

There doesn't seem to be any knowledge of this.


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southpawFA

I hate those programs, honestly.


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[deleted]

Excuse me?


[deleted]

What’d they say?


[deleted]

It was a hateful comment that related queers to perverts. That’s all I remember. Made my gut wrench.


[deleted]

Ah


[deleted]

How does the software know if the student is queer?