“We share the goal of keeping young people safe online and continuously invest in tools, policies, educational resources, and product protections designed to reduce potential harmful interactions on Snapchat. The Heat Initiative is an advocacy organization whose stated mission includes ‘catalyzing’ litigation against technology companies to drive accountability. While advocacy organizations play an important role in raising awareness about online safety issues, we proactively engaged with The Heat Initiative in good faith to share information about our protections because of our common safety interest. Unfortunately, this report does not reflect that dialogue, nor does it provide a balanced or representative assessment of teen safety on Snapchat - it fails to account for the significant investments we have made to help protect our community.

“We caution against drawing sweeping conclusions from a report based on a handful of ‘researcher’-created accounts, rather than a true cold-start experience, and that appears designed to generate alarming headlines rather than provide an objective evaluation of teen safety online. The report extrapolates broad claims from a narrow and unrepresentative sample while largely ignoring the extensive safeguards Snap has implemented for teens.

“The reality is that no single safety feature or policy can eliminate every potential risk online or offline, and no platform is immune from bad actors who seek to abuse technology for illegal activity. That is why we continually adapt our strategies, invest in new protections, and work closely with safety experts, law enforcement, parents, and policymakers to combat evolving threats. We remain committed to strengthening our protections and helping to keep all Snapchatters safe.” – A Snap Company Spokesperson

To:  The Heat Initiative, ParentsTogether Action, 

Protecting teens online is demanding work. It requires rigor, precision, and the discipline to distinguish between insights drawn from a narrow exercise and conclusions about an entire system. Your new report does not meet that standard.

We’d first like to highlight shortcomings in the methodology. Your researchers apparently created a very small number of test accounts registered to “13-year-olds,” used supposed clean devices, followed 50 creator accounts said to be recommended by Snapchat, apparently searched for examples of sensitive topics, and then drew sweeping conclusions from roughly 12 total hours of viewing across two primary test accounts. This exercise may be useful as a narrow probe designed to surface potential edge-case concerns. It is not a sound basis for broad claims about the typical teen experience on Snapchat or about Snap’s seriousness as a company working to help protect young people online.

The report’s own evaluation framework is also unusually expansive. It defines “unsafe content” to include a wide range of risks: from sexual and drug content, violence, and self-harm references to body shaming, plastic surgery, dangerous challenges, racism, extremism, and hate speech. Most of these categories, in fact, contravene Snapchat’s Community Guidelines. But as we explain further below, not all violations carry the same degree of severity or warrant the same level of enforcement. Depending on the nature of the violation, Snap can take action against a user’s content, account, and/or device, and proactively report offenders to law enforcement, when appropriate. 

When such broad content categories are collapsed into a single headline, the result is more clutter than clarity. It may be designed to generate attention, but it does not help parents, policymakers, or platforms understand relative severity, pathways of exposure, or which interventions are most likely to reduce potential harm.

Your report further acknowledges that recommendation patterns changed over time and after researchers followed apparent suggested creators and searched for sensitive terms. Even so, it presents figures such as “739 unsafe videos” and recommends blunt and overly punitive measures such as ending algorithmic recommendations for everyone under 18. If the exercise was designed to be narrow, it should have been described accordingly. Instead, the report repeatedly slides from a constrained experiment into broad, rhetorical conclusions about Snapchat and its users as a whole.

That slippage matters because risk and harm are not the same thing. Both deserve serious attention, but not every exposure produces the same outcome, and not every concerning experience justifies the same policy prescription. Responsible analysis should preserve those distinctions, not ignore them for effect.

None of this is to suggest that Snap views teen safety concerns lightly. We do not. In fact, safety and well-being are central to our work. Internally, our platform safety vision is to promote and support the safety and well-being of the Snapchat community, particularly teens, through product design that has safety ingrained, coupled with technology, strong policies, operational excellence, industry- and cross-sector collaboration, effective regulation, and awareness-raising and education. That is not a slogan. It is the framework under which multiple teams across Snap build, enforce, educate, and adapt every day. It’s why we sought to engage with your organizations openly and collaboratively, despite the simultaneous adversarial social media and press engagement directed at us. 

Snapchat was built differently, opening directly to the camera, not an open feed. That difference matters. We default key privacy and safety settings to stricter standards for teens. We do not allow direct messaging between people who are not mutually accepted friends or are already in each other's contact book, and we have additional protections in place for teens with respect to other platform functionality. Those are meaningful architectural choices, especially in a landscape where unwanted contact remains one of the most common risks young people face online today. ¹

We have also continued to refine the experience for our younger teens. For instance, Snapchatters aged 13 to 15 can now create, save, and share Spotlight videos in a dedicated space visible only to mutually accepted friends. No public followers. No favorite counts. No public distribution for that age band. That is the opposite of what a company indifferent to age-appropriate design would do.

We have also continued to refine the experience for our younger teens. For instance, Snapchatters aged 13 to 15 can now create, save, and share Spotlight videos in a dedicated space visible only to mutually accepted friends. No public followers. No favorite counts. No public distribution for that age band. That is the opposite of what a company indifferent to age-appropriate design would do.

For parents and caregivers, Family Center provides meaningful visibility without forcing teens to surrender the privacy of their conversations wholesale. It allows trusted adults to see their teen’s friends list, who they have communicated with recently, as well as location-sharing settings; set stricter content restrictions; and gain additional context around certain connections. More recently, we also added visibility into time spent across parts of Snapchat and other new signals to help families have better informed conversations about staying safer online.

We have also made it harder for suspicious actors to reach teens in the first place by limiting how they can connect with them. When someone believed to be outside a teen's existing network attempts to connect, we provide in-app warnings, and teens actively use our tools to ignore, block, and report unfamiliar contacts.

The same is true of our work to combat sexual exploitation and sexual extortion. Snap uses proactive detection technology, including hash-matching tools such as PhotoDNA, Google’s CSAI Match, and Google’s Content Safety API, as well as proprietary signal-based detection intended to identify bad actors before they can target others. We also participate in major cross-sector and cross-industry initiatives, including the Technology Coalition’s Lantern project, Take It Down from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Internet Watch Foundation and Childline’s Report Remove program, StopNCII from Southwest Grid for Learning in the UK, Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s various efforts, and Thrive focused on preventing suicide and self-harm. In the first part of 2026, Snap has been enforcing against roughly 220 suspected sexual extortion instances per day, or around 6,600 per month globally. That is what sustained investment looks like.

We are also investing in education, not just enforcement. Our public online safety learning program, “The Keys,” was built with outside experts and organizations, including Common Sense Media, Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), Thorn, the Cyberbullying Research Center, and Song for Charlie, and reviewed by members of Snap’s various global teen Councils for Digital Well-Being and our international Safety Advisory Board. It addresses four serious risks that teens may face on any platform, service, or app: bullying, illicit drug activity, nudes and intimate images, and sexual extortion. It is available to everyone, not just Snapchat users, because digital safety literacy should not be platform-bound.

More broadly, Snap has sought to contribute evidence rather than “panic” to this debate. Our Digital Well-Being Index is cross-platform research covering young people’s experiences across the broader online ecosystem, not Snapchat alone. Across four of five research waves released thus far, the overall DWBI score improved from 62 to 64 ² (over four years) even as reported online risk exposure rose from 76% in 2022 to 81% in 2025 among 13-to-24-year-olds in six countries. That does not mean the online environment is problem-free. It means simplistic narratives of broad-based decline are not borne out by the evidence. It also means policymakers and advocates should stop treating fear as analysis and start asking better questions about support, resilience, design quality, and how to help more people flourish online.

That same research, which covers all platforms, services, and devices with no particular focus on Snapchat, has also shown that digital well-being is stronger when teens have more support assets around them, and that more young people are reaching out for help after experiencing online risk. In other words, the answer is not to flatten the issue into one more alarmist headline. It is to build better products, better reporting systems, better literacy, and better support around young people. That is slower work. It is harder work. It is also more honest and more likely to make a difference.

And the work is producing measurable results. Snap’s data shows meaningful progress on severe-harm views: from December 2025 to June 2026, we’ve seen severe harm views decrease globally by around 71%, ³ alongside an approximately 63% reduction in the underlying prevalence of severe-harm content in a representative sampling of public Stories. That does not mean the job is finished. It means the right response to serious safety challenges is to keep improving systems, not pretend that a limited experiment is a representative account of reality.

To help better protect teens, Heat Initiative and ParentsTogether Action should bring the same discipline to their public claims that they ask of platforms. That means being honest about testing approaches and methodological limits. It means distinguishing between risk and harm. It means acknowledging design choices and safety investments that complicate a preferred narrative. And it means engaging constructively with the companies, experts, parents, and young people doing the difficult work of reducing potential harm online rather than treating caricature as accountability.

We are not claiming perfection. No responsible company should. But we are claiming seriousness, sustained effort, and a willingness to keep improving. On that score, Snap’s record is real, substantial, and continuing.

Sincerely,

Team Snap