the people the joke was sent to were not the reporters. in fact, no human reported it.

the tactical advice is that if you want to make such jokes, do so using a platform that doesn't scan your messages with ai and auto-report to the fbi

That also leaves out Meta, Google, TikTok, X, etc. They all have policies to hand over data without a warrant for posts classified as CSAM, terrorism, self-harm or threats of violence. They have law-enforcement portals and a 24/7 emergency-disclosure process. They are protected from resulting liability by the Stored Communications Act. I wouldn't be surprised if their humor detectors are no more forgiving than SnapChat's.

indeed, all of those platforms should be avoided when you want to make jokes of that nature. they should probably just be avoided in general!