← Scrolling 2 Death![[REPORT] Snapchat is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale, says Jonathan Haidt — Scrolling 2 Death cover](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2Fpodcast_uploaded_nologo%2F39685433%2Fd01d8dba88c432e0.jpeg&w=1920&q=75)
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Foreign. Something major just hit about Snapchat. Your child might be on Snapchat or might be asking you to go on it because all his friends are well. Jonathan Haidt and his team at Anxious Generation did a deep dive into Snapchat, examining court cases, reviewing internal documents, even speaking with top executives. What did they find? That Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale and that company insiders are aware they are not willing to make changes which protect kids. Here's what parents need to know and what you can tell your child when you say, sorry, no Snapchat in our house. Let's touch on addiction. In January 2017, Snapchat starts designing Snap Streaks, which is a daily score that kids get for each consecutive day they interact with each other on Snapchat. At the time, a Snapchat employee stated, wow, we should add more addicting features like this. A more skeptical and responsible team member said, I think it would be interesting to investigate how healthy Snapstreak is for users giving children a public score they can compare with their friends, which keeps them coming back day after day. This is how you fuel addiction, and 45% of teens now use Snapchat almost constantly. An internal presentation at Snapchat talks about how streaks cause pressure and make using Snapchat stressful. But anything to keep our kids logging in every single day. Oh, and if you break the Snap streak, you can pay to restore it. When it comes to drugs, there is a teen opioid crisis in our country and it is fueled by Snapchat. Snap has known about this problem for years. Back in 2019, a Snap Communications director complained internally that drug dealing had increased significantly on Snapchat. She says that drug dealers use stories to amass a huge amount of subscribers with the lack of repercussions and that Snapch may end up deleting a reported user. But they don't block by device, so dealers just pop right back up with a new account. Snap's own meeting notes say, quote, bad actors prefer to transact on Snapchat given the ephemerality of the communications on our platform. He means the disappearing messages. Reports internally stated that 700,000 Snapchat users are exposed to drug content on Snapchat every single day, and a security firm who advised Snapchat told them, it takes under a minute on Snapchat to be in a position to purchase illegal and harmful substances. Multiple security firms warned Snapchat of this years ago and Snap has taken no meaningful action to protect kids from illegal and deadly drugs. And kids are dying still to this day from Fentanyl, they were sold on Snapchat. These kids were told they're taking an Adderall or a Percocet. They are being deceived to death and Snapchat is the conduit. Also available quickly and easily on Snapchat. Illegal guns. Not BB guns or hunting rifles. We're talking assault rifles. At one point, Snapchat noted internally that there were 50 posts per day selling illegal guns with an average of 9,000 views. What about child sexual abuse material and sexual predation? Snapchat is the largest source of leaked videos and images and we're talking about sexually explicit content involving children. This is leading to in person predation and assault. There are reports of predators finding kids as young as 8 years old through Snapchat. An internal Snapchat email from 2021 noted there was a rise in child sexual assaults that were facilitated by Snapchat. And a report in 2023 noted that Snapchat was one of the top platforms used in the recruitment of human trafficking victims. Internally, Snapchat complained that requirements to identify grooming would be too invasive of user privacy and would create disproportionate admin costs. The risks were made even greater by the addition of Snapchat's geolocator called Snapmap. In September of 2022, Snap employees acknowledged that Snapmap was making users more vulnerable to predators, leading to real world harms. Snapchat's safety statements that only friends can see, users location are misleading and Snapchat knows it puts children in danger when it comes to financial sextortion. Investigations have found that Snapchat is the ideal space to target kids sextortion attempts. Internal documents show that Snapchat gets 10,000 reports of sextortion every month and internal communications admit that this is a very small portion of a more massive issue that is our children being contacted by scammers. An employee at Snapchat stated, quote, God, I'm so pissed that we're overrun by this sextortion shit right now. We've twiddled our thumbs and wrung our hands all effing year. I'm going to add while children die, there have been dozens and dozens of suicides as a result of these sextortion attempts. Other Snapchat employees complained internally that identifying and protecting minors from sexually explicit content and predators would overburden its moderators. One specific Snapchat Predator had 75 different reports against him for extorting nude images from minors, yet the account was still active. Snapchat has shown a complete lack of urgency and commitment to addressing child sexual abuse material and grooming on their platform. Platform. They're failing to put up basic safeguards and when a child does report abuse, Snapchat employees admit that by design, over 90% of reports are ignored and cyberbullying is rampant on Snapchat. The disappearing message feature has led to Snapchat serving as a hub for bullying because they have no fear of consequences. So to summarize, the design choices made by Snapchat makes it irrefutably unsafe for children. If you run a platform that's used by millions of children, it's your responsibility to make design choices that benefit them instead of harm them. John Height's team made six direct requests of Snapchat to make your platform more appropriate for the kids using it. 1. Remove the quick Add feature which is connecting predators and children. 2. Remove the addictive streaks feature. 3. Remove beauty filters. 4. Remove engagement based algorithms which is pushing harmful content and substances and people into children's feeds. 5. Stop the disappearing messages. There's no good reason for that. 6. Remove kids under 13 from your platform. You know there are millions on there. Is it likely that Snapchat will make these changes? No. Do I hope they do? Of course. But in the meantime, say no to Snapchat. Say no to all social media until your child is at least 16. Send this video and this report to your friends. Make a pact to have your kids connect through safer beans, not one that connects children to anonymous adult strangers.