December 04, 2024

December 04, 2024

We publish this transparency report twice a year to provide insight into Snap’s safety efforts. We are committed to these efforts and continually strive to make these reports more comprehensive and informative for the many stakeholders who care deeply about our content moderation, law enforcement practices, and the safety and wellbeing of the Snapchat community. 

This Transparency Report covers the first half of 2024 (January 1 - June 30). As with our previous reports, we share data about the global volume of in-app content and account-level reports our Trust & Safety teams received and enforced across specific categories of Community Guidelines violations; how we responded to requests from law enforcement and governments; and how we responded to notices of copyright and trademark infringement. We also provide country-specific insights in the files linked at the bottom of this page.

As part of our ongoing commitment to continually improve our transparency reports, we are also introducing new data highlighting our proactive efforts to detect and enforce against a wider range of violations of our Community Guidelines. We have included this data at both the global and country levels within this report and will continue to do so going forward. We have also corrected a labeling error in our previous reports: where we previously referred to “Total Content Enforced”, we now refer to “Total Enforcements” to reflect the fact that the data provided in the relevant columns includes both content-level and account-level enforcements.

For more information about our policies for combating potential online harms, and plans to continue evolving our reporting practices, please read our recent Safety & Impact blog about this Transparency Report. To find additional safety and privacy resources on Snapchat, see our About Transparency Reporting tab at the bottom of the page.

Please note that the most up-to-date version of this Transparency Report can be found in the EN-US locale.

Our Trust & Safety teams enforce our Community Guidelines both proactively (through the use of automated tools) and reactively (in response to reports), as further detailed in the following sections of this report. In this reporting cycle (H1 2024), our Trust & Safety teams took the following enforcement actions: 

Below is a breakdown per type of Community Guidelines violations concerned, including the median turnaround time between the time we detected the violation (either proactively or upon receipt of a report) and the time we took final action on the relevant content or account:

During the reporting period, we saw a Violative View Rate (VVR) of 0.01 percent, which means that out of every 10,000 Snap and Story views on Snapchat, 1 contained content found to violate our Community Guidelines. 

From January 1 - June 30, 2024, in response to in-app reports of violations of our Community Guidelines, Snap’s Trust & Safety teams took a total of 6,223,618 enforcement actions globally, including enforcements against 3,842,507 unique accounts. The median turnaround time for our Trust & Safety teams to take enforcement action in response to those reports was ~24 minutes. A breakdown per reporting category is provided below. 

Our overall reporting volumes remained fairly stable in H1 2024, as compared to the previous six months. This cycle, we saw an increase in total enforcements and total unique accounts enforced by approximately 16%.

Over the last 12 months, Snap introduced new reporting mechanisms for users, which account for changes to our reported and enforced volumes and for increases in turnaround times in this reporting period (H1 2024). Specifically:

• Group Chat Reporting: We introduced Group Chat Reporting on October 13, 2023, which enables users to report abuse occurring in a multi-person chat. This change impacted the makeup of our metrics across reporting categories (because some potential harms are more likely to occur in a chat context) and increased report actionability. 

• Account Reporting Enhancements: We also evolved our Account Reporting feature to give reporting users an option to submit chat evidence when reporting an account suspected of being operated by a bad actor. This change, which provides us with greater evidence and context to assess account reports, launched on February 29, 2024. 

Chat Reports, and especially Group Chat Reports, are among the most complex and time-consuming to review, which drove up turnaround times across the board. 

Reporting for suspected Child Sexual Exploitation & Abuse (CSEA), Harassment & Bullying, and Hate Speech were particularly impacted by the two changes described above, and by shifts in the broader ecosystem. Specifically:

• CSEA: We observed an increase in CSEA-related reports and enforcements in H1 2024. Specifically, we saw a 64% increase in total in-app reports by users, an 82% increase in total enforcements, and a 108% increase in total unique accounts enforced. These increases are largely driven by the introduction of Group Chat and Account Reporting functionalities. Given the sensitive nature of this moderation queue, a select team of highly trained agents is assigned to review reports of potential CSEA-related violations. The influx of additional reports combined with our teams adapting to new trainings has resulted in an increase in turnaround times. Moving forward, we have increased the size of our global vendor teams significantly to reduce turnaround times and accurately enforce on reports of potential CSEA. We expect that our H2 2024 Transparency Report will reflect the fruits of this effort with a materially improved turnaround time. 
  

• Harassment & Bullying: Based on reports, we have observed that Harassment & Bullying disproportionately occurs in chats, and particularly group chats. The improvements we introduced to Group Chat Reporting and Account Reporting help us take more comprehensive action when assessing reports in this reporting category. Additionally, as of this period, we require users to input a comment when submitting a harassment and bullying report. We review this comment to contextualize each report. Together, these changes led to material increases in total enforcements (+91%), total unique accounts enforced (+82%), and turnaround time (+245 mins) for corresponding reports. 
  

• Hate Speech: In H1 2024, we observed increases in reported content, total enforcements, and turnaround time for Hate Speech. Specifically, we saw a 61% increase in in-app reports, a 127% increase in total enforcements, and a 125% increase in total unique accounts enforced. This was due, in part, to improvements in our chat reporting mechanisms (as previously discussed), and was further exacerbated by the geopolitical environment, particularly the continuation of the Israel-Hamas conflict. 

This reporting period, we saw a ~65% decrease in total enforcements and a ~60% decrease in total unique accounts enforced in response to reports of suspected Spam & Abuse, reflecting improvements in our proactive detection and enforcement tools. We saw similar declines in total enforcements in response to reports of content relating to Self Harm and Suicide (~80% decreases), reflecting our updated victim-centric approach, according to which our Trust & Safety teams will, in appropriate cases, send relevant users self-help resources, rather than take an enforcement action against those users. This approach was informed by members of our Safety Advisory Board, including a pediatric professor and medical doctor who specializes in interactive media and internet disorders.

We deploy automated tools to proactively detect and, in some cases, enforce against violations of our Community Guidelines. These tools include hash-matching tools (including PhotoDNA and Google Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) Match), abusive language detection tools (which detect and enforce based on an identified and regularly updated list of abusive keywords and emojis), and multi-modal artificial intelligence / machine learning technology. 

In H1 2024, we took the following enforcement actions after proactively detecting, through the use of automated tools, violations of our Community Guidelines:

Sexual exploitation of any member of our community, especially minors, is illegal, abhorrent, and prohibited by our Community Guidelines. Preventing, detecting, and eradicating Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSEA) on our platform is a top priority for Snap, and we continually evolve our capabilities to combat these and other crimes.

We use active technology detection tools, such as PhotoDNA robust hash-matching and Google’s Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) Match to identify known illegal images and videos of CSEA, respectively. In addition, in some cases, we use behavioral signals to enforce against other potentially illegal CSEA activity. We report CSEA-related content to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), as required by law. NCMEC then, in turn, coordinates with domestic or international law enforcement, as required.

In the first half of 2024, we took the following actions upon detecting CSEA on Snapchat (either proactively or upon receiving a report):

*Note that each submission to NCMEC can contain multiple pieces of content. The total individual pieces of media submitted to NCMEC is equal to our total content enforced.

We care deeply about the mental health and well-being of Snapchatters, which continues to inform our decisions to build Snapchat differently. As a platform designed for communications between and among real friends, we believe Snapchat can play a unique role in empowering friends to help each other in difficult times. This is why we have developed resources and support for Snapchatters in need. 

Our Here For You search tool shows resources from expert local partners when users search for certain topics related to mental health, anxiety, depression, stress, suicidal thoughts, grief and bullying. We have also developed a page dedicated to financial sextortion and other sexual risks and harms, in an effort to support those in distress. Our global list of safety resources is publicly available to all Snapchatters, in our Privacy, Safety & Policy Hub. 

When our Trust & Safety teams become aware of a Snapchatter in distress, they can forward self-harm prevention and support resources, and notify emergency response personnel when appropriate. The resources that we share are available on our global list of safety resources, and are publicly available to all Snapchatters.

Below we provide information about appeals we received from users requesting a review of our decision to lock their account:

* As discussed in the “Analysis” section above, stopping the spread of content or activity related to child sexual exploitation is a top priority. Snap devotes significant resources toward this goal and has zero tolerance for such conduct. We have expanded our global vendor teams to adapt to new policies and reporting features for Snapchat. In doing so, between H2 2023 and H1 2024, we reduced the turnaround time for CSEA appeals from 152 days to 15 days. We continually strive to improve our processes, including in relation to appeal turnaround times.

This section provides an overview of our Trust & Safety teams’ actions to enforce our Community Guidelines, both proactively and in response to in-app reports of violations, in a sampling of geographic regions. Our Community Guidelines apply to all content on Snapchat—and all Snapchatters—across the globe, regardless of location.

Information for individual countries, including all EU Member States, is available for download via the attached CSV file.

Snap is committed to ensuring that all ads are fully compliant with our advertising policies. We believe in a responsible and respectful approach to advertising, creating a safe and enjoyable experience for all of our users. All ads are subject to our review and approval. In addition, we reserve the right to remove ads, including in response to user feedback, which we take seriously. 

Below we have included insight into our moderation for paid advertisements that are reported to us following their publication on Snapchat. Note that ads on Snapchat can be removed for a variety of reasons as outlined in Snap’s Advertising Policies, including deceptive content, adult content, violent or disturbing content, hate speech, and intellectual property infringement. Additionally, you can now find Snapchat’s Ads Gallery in the navigation bar of this transparency report.