This Platform Might Be Worse Than TikTok

We've talked extensively about the dangers of Tick Tock, but what if I told you that Snapchat was way more dangerous? While Tick Tock's influence is more subtle in psychological terms, Snapchat puts young people at immediate, sometimes life-threatening risk.

On the 2nd of October 2016, five men broke into Kim Kardashian West's apartment in Paris and robbed her at gunpoint. The masked men made away with around 10 million dollars worth of jewelry. Luckily, Kim was left unharmed. In an interview with Vice, Eunice Abbas, a member of the infamous "Grandpa Robbers" gang, who allegedly robbed the reality star, said they used Snapchat to figure out everything they needed to know about the operation: where she was, how much jewelry she had with her, and the fact that she was alone in her apartment at the time. Kim had posted a Snapchat story about how she was home while everyone else was going out, informing the robbers of the perfect opportunity to strike.

Since that incident, other criminals have taken to Snapchat to find and rob people in a similar fashion. Now, you might think you’re more careful and that you don’t give away personal information on your Snapchat stories, but the reality is even little things like an address on the package you're opening on screen or the number plate of your car can give criminals so much information about you. This is a big problem on every social media platform, but the unique challenge with Snapchat, unlike the other apps, is that it sells you a false sense of security with its supposed privacy features. If you believe that everything you share on the app is temporary, you’re more likely to share things without giving them much thought. This is what leads to many of the issues plaguing the app today.

To understand how Snapchat's false sense of security negatively affects its users, we have to go back to the very beginning. Reggie Brown was allegedly talking about sexting with some friends when he came up with the idea of a social media app that allowed users to share pictures that disappeared after a few seconds. For obvious reasons, Brown would then share this idea with his friends Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, and the three of them came together to form Peekaboo. After some shady maneuvers to kick Brown out of the company, Spiegel and Murphy relaunched the app as Snapchat in July 2011.

Making the case for Snapchat in the company’s first blog post, Spiegel said, “Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment; it’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion—not just what appears to be pretty or perfect.” Like when I think I’m good at imitating the face of a star-nosed mole, or if I want to show my friend the girl I have a crush on—it would be awkward if I got around. And when I'm away at college and miss my mom or my friends. But in actuality, everyone knew what Snapchat was for at least the very core of it, and the company wasn’t hiding it.

Have a look at Snapchat on a Wayback machine, and you’ll see that the company used young, scantily dressed models to market the app. It was a subtle nod to the kinds of images the company felt people would use the app for the most, and people did. The ephemeral nature of the app meant that users could do whatever they wanted without fear that their digital footprint would someday come back to haunt them. But the reality couldn’t be farther from the truth.

While Snapchat prevents people from taking screenshots or screen recordings of messages without informing the other party, people have found many easy ways to circumvent this for nefarious purposes. This has led to some horrific experiences for users who thought they were sharing media that would disappear only to find it all over the Internet weeks later with no way of taking it down. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of sites all over the Internet dedicated to sharing revenge that was explicitly sourced from Snapchat messages, pictures, and videos that the sender was convinced would disappear plastered all over the internet.

“My life has just gone through a down spiral. I’m homeless because of this. I lost my family.” These were the words of a victim in the trial of Kevin Bullard, a man who ran one of the infamous sites where these snaps were re-uploaded. You might think that none of this is Snapchat’s fault; after all, adults need to be responsible for their own actions and decisions. To an extent, you would be right. But the sad truth is that these issues don’t only affect adults.

According to Data Reportal, 20% of Snapchat’s users—around 123 million people—are between the ages of 13 and 17, all of whom are exposed to the same dangers of the disappearing text and the vulnerability that it presents. The Times UK published an investigation into Snapchat that uncovered thousands of cases of pedophiles using the app to request inappropriate pictures from children and trying to groom young teenagers. Teenagers themselves were also found using the platform to share CP. The self-destructing nature of Snapchat’s messages makes it difficult to track the extent of the harm the app has caused and is still causing. The situation became so bad that every day, police in the UK are investigating about three new child sexual exploitation cases facilitated on Snapchat.

For these reasons, the investigation labeled the app a safe haven for child abuse, which is honestly one of the worst reputations a social media platform could ever have. For an app that allows anyone 13 and above to have an account, Snapchat needs to put many more measures in place to safeguard its own users, and sadly, not much is being done to that effect.

As if those issues weren’t bad enough, in 2017, Snapchat released a feature called Snap Map that allows users to share their live location with friends on the app. On its own, this is already an alarming feature. It saves criminals the trouble of trying to decipher your location through all your posts. All they have to do is make an account, add you as a friend, and once you accept, that’s it—they’ve got everything they need to cause terrible damage.

Let’s say you’re careful not to add people you don’t know in real life as friends: Snap Map still gives stalkers the perfect platform to find and follow their victims around. If shows like you have taught us anything, it’s that stalkers are usually closer to you than you think and way more dangerous than you can imagine—child molesters, human traffickers, groomers. Think about the fact that all these dangerous people can find the location of young kids in just a few clicks. It’s mind-boggling when you consider just how risky it is.

So far, we’ve talked about the unique dangers of using Snapchat, but let’s not forget that the app also includes the same problems that most other social media apps suffer from: things like cyberbullying. The anonymity of the internet has created a safe space for cyberbullies, hate speech, and just vile comments in general. The volatile nature of Snapchat messages makes that problem even worse. People can send the most horrid messages without fear because they know that once the person reads it, there’s no receipt. This gives the receiver a memory they can’t run away from, and the sender has no repercussions for their actions because there’s no evidence unless they screenshot it.

Then there’s addiction. Figures from the Healthy Journal show that teenagers have an average daily screen time of eight and a half hours. That’s more than an entire adult workday spent on social media. To be fair, most of that time is spent on TikTok, thanks to its fast-paced content and impressively accurate algorithm, and on other social media platforms like Instagram and even YouTube. But Snapchat has a trick up its sleeve that keeps its users coming back for more—streaks.

The record for the longest-running Snap streak is currently held by Hannah and Lauren, best friends who have been sending each other a picture or video every single day since the feature was first released on April 6, 2015. If somehow you don’t know what they are, Snap streaks form when you and your friends send each other a picture or a video within 24 hours for more than three consecutive days. It’s represented by a fire emoji alongside the number of days you have snapped each other.

This creates a huge incentive for people to use the app at least once every 24 hours to keep their streak going. Snapchat uses tricks like this all over the app, like the friend emojis, which add little emojis to users' display pictures to indicate the frequency of interaction between you and them. Like this one when you and a person have been each other's best friend for two months in a row, and this one when they’re one of your best friends and this one when your Snap streak is ending soon so you can remember to send that snap.

Fast features like these create a fear of missing out in users' hearts, encouraging them to stay on the app for as long as possible, even when it might not be healthy to do so. Instead of spending hours on Snapchat every single day, your screen time is better spent learning subjects like computer science, mathematics, and logic, all of which can help you better yourself in the future.

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Back to our story. When it’s not addiction, there’s also the problem of perfectionism. Remember what Spiegel said in that first blog post about Snapchat: “It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion, not just what appears to be pretty or perfect.” Perhaps this was the company’s original plan, but that quickly changed once they launched filters. Research has shown that people who use filters more frequently often experience increased feelings of dissatisfaction with their real selves.

Humans are social animals, and we’ve always lived and survived in groups. As a result, we’ve always compared ourselves to others. Back when we lived in small hunter-gatherer communities, it was fine—but there really aren’t many people to compare yourself to, and the need to compare certainly wasn’t constantly in your face. Sadly, with the rise of globalization and things like television and magazines becoming more widespread, people started comparing themselves to their favorite celebrities, which in itself was already bad enough.

But what happens when people start comparing themselves not to other people, but to a digitally altered version of themselves—brighter skin, whiter teeth, more symmetrical features, accentuated cheekbones, and jawlines? Snapchat made all these available to users at the snap of a finger, pun intended. The result? A 2021 study carried out by the University of London researchers on 175 women and non-binary people between the ages of 18 and 30 found that 94% of participants felt pressure to look a certain way, with over half of them saying the pressure was intense. All of this because of their use of filters.

We’re witnessing a generation of people who no longer are satisfied with how they look in real life, no thanks to how much better filters can make them look. Young people are now more than ever considering plastic surgery in order to look more like their filtered selves. It’s gotten so common that plastic surgeon Dr. Tijian Esho coined the term “Snapchat Dysmorphia” to explain the phenomenon.

Although this video has been pretty critical of the platform, the truth is that Snapchat isn’t all terrible. In fact, more than anything, it’s a fun messaging app. It helps bridge the gap between Android and iPhone users by providing a universal messaging platform that both the green and blue sides of the world can use. It’s also a great way to keep in touch with your friends and family, especially for people who don’t see each other often.

With snaps, you can easily share bits about your day without overthinking it because you know the pictures aren’t going to live forever. Snapchat is actually the closest digital messaging platform we have to real-world communication. Our interactions with each other and the world around us are fleeting. We may remember the most important conversations, but most of our everyday interactions just fade away like a snap after 24 hours.

Even features like Snap Map allow close friends and family to check up on the whereabouts of one another without any effort. In the case of an emergency, it can be life-saving by giving the authorities immediate access to the location of the victim. What people need to remember, though, is that Snapchat is not impervious to the problems that affect every other social media platform or even the Internet itself.

Just like you would on any other platform, be conscious of what you share on Snap and understand that nothing is ever a complete secret. Before you hit that send button, keep in mind that there’s a possibility that whatever you send will get out one day, and as a result, you need to be careful with what you share and, more importantly, who you share it with. Don’t get bitten by the false sense of impermanence that the app gives.

Also, remember to take breaks and don’t let features like streaks and friend emojis keep you on the app longer than necessary because overstimulation could ruin your life. Click the video on your screen right now to find out how and why.