We also provide internal guidance to ensure that our moderation teams understand the ways that election risks often intersect with other categories of harm, including hate speech, misogyny, targeted harassment, or even impersonation.

All of our policies apply to any form of content on our platform, whether user-generated or AI-generated. ¹ We also make clear that all policies apply equally to all Snapchatters, irrespective of their prominence. In all cases, our approach to harmful deceptive content is straightforward: we remove it. We don’t label it, we don’t downrank it; we take it down. Snapchatters who violate our content rules receive a strike and a warning message; if they persist in such violations, they may lose their account privileges (though all Snapchatters are provided an opportunity to appeal our enforcement decision). 

3. Diligent Approach to Political Ads

As a platform that permits political advertising in connection with democratic elections, we’ve taken care to adopt rigorous practices to mitigate risks to election integrity. Most notably, every political ad on Snapchat is human-reviewed and fact-checked before it is eligible for placement on our platform. To support these efforts, we partner as needed with Poynter and other International Fact Checking Network-member organizations to provide independent, nonpartisan assessments of whether advertisers’ claims can be substantiated. Our vetting process for political ads includes a thorough check for any misleading use of AI to create deceptive images or content.

To support transparency, an ad must clearly disclose who paid for it. And under our Political Ad Policies, we don’t allow ads to be paid for by foreign governments or any individuals or entities located outside of the country where the election is taking place. We believe it’s in the public’s interest to see which political ads are approved to run and keep a Political Ads Library that includes information about targeting, costs, and other insights.  

To ensure compliance with all of these processes, our Commercial Content Policies disallow influencers from promoting paid political content outside of traditional ad formats. This ensures that all paid political content is subject to our ad review practices and disclaimer requirements.

4. Collaborative, Coordinated Operations

At Snap we take a highly collaborative approach to operationalizing our election integrity safeguards. Internally, we have convened a cross-functional election integrity team, including misinformation, political advertising, and cybersecurity experts, to monitor all relevant developments in connection with elections throughout the world in 2024. The breadth of representation in this group reflects our whole-of-company approach we take to safeguarding platform integrity, with representatives from Trust & Safety, Content Moderation, Engineering, Product, Legal, Policy, Privacy Operations, Security, and others.

Across our content moderation and enforcement, we maintain language capabilities commensurate with all countries in which Snap operates. We have also operationalized a crisis response protocol, to ensure operational agility in the face of high-risk global events.

This spirit of coordination extends to external collaborations as well. We routinely engage with democracy stakeholders and civil society organizations for advice, research insights, and to hear concerns or receive incident escalations. (Many signatories to your letter remain valued partners to us for these purposes.) We often brief governments and elections officials on our approach to platform integrity. We also participate in multi stakeholder initiatives, as we did this year, for example, working with civil society, elections authorities, and fellow industry stakeholders to help shape the Voluntary Election Integrity Guidelines for Technology Companies. And we welcome additional opportunities to engage constructively with all stakeholders in support of mitigating digital risks to civic processes. 

5. Offering tools and resources to empower Snapchatters

At Snap, we have always believed that civic engagement is one of the most powerful forms of self-expression. As a platform that helps people express themselves and has significant reach with new and first-time voters, we make it a priority to help our community get access to accurate and trusted information about news and world events, including where and how they can vote in their local election.

In 2024, these efforts will focus on three pillars that have remained constant throughout the years: 

• Education: Provide factual and relevant content about elections, candidates, and issues through our content and talent partnerships on Discover.

• Registration: Encourage Snapchatters to register to vote leveraging third-party credible civic infrastructure. 

• Engagement: Create excitement and energy in-app around civics and encourage Snapchatters to vote before/on Election Day. 

Many of these plans are currently in the works for 2024, but they will build on many of the successes we’ve had over the years with connecting Snapchatters with informative resources.

Conclusion

At such a consequential moment both for democracies around the world and the acceleration of powerful new technologies, it is as important as ever that platforms are transparent about their values. And on this point, our values could not be clearer: we reject any abuse of our platform that threatens to undermine civic processes or poses a risk to Snapchatters’ safety.  We’re proud of our record to date, but we must continue to remain vigilant to election-related risks. To that end, we thank you again for your constructive engagement on these issues, 

Sincerely, 

Kip Wainscott

Head of Platform Policy