Snapchat just announced that users between the ages of 13 and 15 will now only be able to share Spotlight posts with people they already follow back. Those users will also get a separate profile that limits their Stories and Spotlight visibility to mutual connections only, and their content will no longer show public metrics like favorite counts that pressure kids to chase engagement.Users aged 16 to 18 will still be able to share content more broadly, but with added limitations, restricted to friends, followers, and mutual connections. Parents will also gain deeper visibility into how much time their kids are spending on the platform through Snapchat’s Family Center.On the surface, this sounds like a tech company doing the right thing. And it is. But let’s not give Snapchat a standing ovation just yet, because the trail of tragedy that led to this moment is long, painful, and filled with children who deserved better far sooner.
Snapchat launched in 2011 as a simple disappearing photo app. Messages vanished. Stories expired. It felt private, fun, and harmless. That disappearing feature, the thing that made Snapchat cool, turned out to be one of the most dangerous design choices in social media history when it came to protecting children.
According to multiple lawsuits filed against the company, Snapchat’s disappearing messages feature created an environment that allowed drug dealers to operate with near total impunity, posting drug menus that disappeared within 24 hours and erasing all evidence of criminal transactions. The platform that marketed itself as a goofy filter app for teenagers had quietly become something far darker.
Internal Snap Inc. emails revealed in court cases showed that the company receives around 10,000 reports of sextortion every single month, and that figure is believed to be only a fraction of the total abuse actually occurring on the platform, according to The Verge. Ten thousand reports. Every month. And the app was available to 13-year-olds.
One of the most devastating chapters in Snapchat’s history is the role the platform played in the teen fentanyl crisis, a crisis that killed children across the country while parents had no idea what was happening on their kids’ phones. The National Crime Prevention Council described Snapchat as “a digital open-air drug market allowing drug dealers to market and sell fake pills to unsuspecting tweens and teens.
Drug dealers used the platform’s disappearing content features to advertise counterfeit pills that were quietly laced with lethal doses of fentanyl, and then connected directly with teenagers who had no idea what they were actually buying. In 2020, 1,630 teenagers died from overdoses in the US, almost double the number from 2019. The figure jumped another 10% the following year. The rise wasn’t being driven by more teen drug use. The drugs had simply become deadlier and more accessible, and Snapchat was one of the roads that led dealers directly to kids’ doors.
The lead plaintiffs in one major lawsuit are the parents of Alexander Neville, a 14-year-old boy from Orange County, California who died from a fentanyl overdose after buying what he believed was a pill from a Snapchat dealer. His mother Amy Neville has since traveled the country warning other parents. “We didn’t know about fentanyl,” she said. Nobody was talking about it at the time, and no one was talking about the depth of social media harms.” She had checked her son’s social media for predators and bullies, but she didn’t know about the coded emojis teenagers and drug dealers use to communicate drug transactions right out in the open.
Congress even introduced the Cooper Davis and Devin Norring Act, a bill named after two teenagers who died after purchasing fentanyl-laced pills on Snapchat. Two kids whose names are now attached to legislation because the platform didn’t protect them when it had every opportunity to do so.
The fentanyl crisis is one part of the story. The sextortion epidemic is another — and it has been equally devastating. In early 2022, analysts at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children began noticing a terrifying pattern. Teen boys were being catfished by individuals pretending to be teenage girls, manipulated into sending explicit photos, and then immediately extorted for money. The scheme was rapid-fire, sometimes occurring within hours of first contact. And the FBI confirmed that in an 18-month period ending in March 2023, at least 20 minors, primarily boys, killed themselves after falling victim to this scam.
Since 2021, 38 teenage boys in the US have died by suicide after falling victim to sextortion scammers. Among them was 17-year-old Jordan DeMay from Michigan. Jordan was told that explicit images he believed he had sent to a girl would be released unless he paid $1,000 to keep them secret. He died by suicide in March 2022. The two Nigerian brothers behind the scheme were later extradited to the US and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
In April 2023, 13-year-old Timothy Barnett from Sumter, South Carolina died by suicide after being sextorted on Snapchat. An adult predator posing as a young girl manipulated Timothy into sending explicit images and then threatened to share them unless he complied with their demands. Unable to cope with the trauma and fear of exposure, Timothy took his own life.
His family filed a lawsuit against Snapchat arguing the platform was defectively designed, that its lack of age verification and parental controls made it unreasonably dangerous for minors. A platform that markets itself to children. That allows sign-ups at age 13. That for years gave predators nearly unrestricted access to those children through its public-facing features.
Internal emails revealed in litigation showed that former workers in Snap’s trust and safety department had repeatedly complained about senior leaders ignoring their warnings about the platform’s role in drug sales and child exploitation for years. The people inside the building were raising alarms. The people at the top weren’t listening. And children were dying in the silence between those two facts. Earlier this year, Snap settled a lawsuit accusing it of abetting social media addiction, and is currently fighting multiple similar cases across the US. More than 6,000 lawsuits have been filed against the company related to harm facilitated by the platform’s features.
The new restrictions are real progress. Limiting public Spotlight sharing for users under 16, creating separate visibility profiles for younger teens, removing engagement metrics that pressure kids to perform for strangers, and giving parents more insight into their children’s activity — all of it matters. But it took children dying. It took thousands of lawsuits. It took congressional bills named after dead teenagers to get here.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has argued in recent interviews that Snapchat has a “positive impact” on users because it connects them to friends, and that the app shouldn’t be compared to TikTok and Instagram. And maybe he’s right that the platforms are different. But the receipts on what happened to children on his platform, and what the company knew while it was happening, make that argument a very difficult one to sit with.
