One year ago today, Snap joined the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as it launched “Know2Protect,” a first-of-its-kind public awareness campaign about the risks of child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) online. In 2025, we’re doubling down on those efforts and continuing to support DHS as it works to educate and empower young people, parents, school officials, and policymakers about a range of sexual harms impacting children and teens. 

Snap was honored to be the first founding supporter of Know2Protect in 2024. We donated advertising space for the campaign to post educational materials on Snapchat; we featured the campaign on our platform and on our Privacy and Safety Hub; and we created a fun Lens to help teens and others learn about these risks and how they can best protect themselves, their peers, and their communities.

We also conducted three phases of research, the latest of which shows that familiarity with the campaign is growing. Nearly three in 10 (28%) who had heard of Know2Protect demonstrated familiarity with the campaign, a 17-point jump since October 2024. In addition, almost half (46%) of those who reported being aware of Know2Protect were able to describe campaign elements in an open-ended question format, as compared to one-third six months ago. Encouragingly, nearly nine in 10 (89%) said the campaign caused them to seek out more information about online safety, a 12-point pop since October 2024. This was true of both teens and young adults, and males and females, with no significant differences between the groups. 

“The collaboration between Snap and the Know2Protect campaign is instrumental in helping us reach key demographics with critical awareness and prevention messaging,” said Kate Kennedy, Know2Protect Campaign Manager. “Together we are making sure young people have access to information that can protect them and their peers from online predators, and this is making a real difference in saving lives.”

The Snap research also polled teens (aged 13-17) and young adults (aged 18-24) in the U.S. about the various dimensions of CSEA online. The research, which Snap commissioned but covers Generation Z’s experiences across all platforms and services with no specific focus on Snapchat, continues to inform the campaign and our individual efforts. We’re releasing the results of this third tranche of research today, on the one-year anniversary of the launch of Know2Protect.

Research results

From March 12 to 17, 2025, we polled 1,012 U.S.-based teens and young adults, asking about their exposure to, and knowledge of, various online sexual risks. Below are a few key findings:

• Generation Z teens and young adults in the U.S. faced the same set of challenges with respect to certain online sexual risks as they did in 2024; the incidence of these challenges remained largely unchanged with regard to sharing intimate imagery, “grooming ¹,” “catfishing ²,” and sextortion ³.

• One-quarter (24%) said they had shared intimate imagery, unchanged from April 2024, while a third (33%) reported having been groomed online, down three percentage points from the first round of research fielded last April. Meanwhile, 35% said they had been catfished, also down one percentage point from the same period.

• Fake personas remain pervasive online and are a major driver of digital risk exposure. Among those who admitted to having shared intimate imagery, more than half (55%) said they were deceived about a person’s identity. For those who reported having experienced  grooming or catfishing behaviors, half (51%) said the other person lied about their identity. 

• Much like the findings from the first installment of research in April 2024, the latest results show that sharing intimate imagery and being catfished continue to be high-risk gateways to online “sextortion.” 46% of those who admitted to having shared intimate imagery and 31% of those who said they had been catfished said they were threatened with sextortion. Also, half (50%) of those who admitted to having shared intimate imagery said they lost control of the material once it was released. This was even more significant for teens, where nearly two-thirds of respondents (63%) said they lost control of their photos and videos – a 13-point jump since the last round of research in October 2024, and 20 percentage points higher than the 18-to-24-year-olds.

• While most respondents said they shared intimate images with people they knew in real life, a surprising 61% said they sent such imagery to people they knew or met online only. 

• Respondents’ concerns about catfishing and sexual “deepfakes” (AI-generated sexual imagery) continued to grow, with both edging up by four percentage points compared to  a year ago. Concerns about online grooming for sexual purposes remained unchanged, while apprehension regarding intimate imagery edged down by a percentage point compared to April 2024. 

These latest findings are an extension of Snap’s broader research over the past three years, examining the digital well-being of teens and young adults in six countries. More on that study, which is about to enter its fourth year, can be found here. Our well-being research includes Australia, France, Germany, India, the UK, and the U.S. Full results are released each year on international Safer Internet Day in February.     

Fighting back against CSEA 

Supporting Know2Protect aligns with Snap’s long-standing commitment and actions to combat CSEA online. To help safeguard our community, we’ve adopted and implemented a range of proactive and responsive measures to identify and remove CSEA and the offenders who engage in this reprehensible conduct. 

Proactively, we use PhotoDNA robust hash-matching technology and Google’s CSAI Match to find and remove duplicates of known illegal images and videos, respectively. We also leverage Google’s Content Safety API to help identify new, never-before-hashed imagery. In addition, in some cases, we use behavioral “signals” to identify potentially illegal activity. We want to reduce the number of users targeted and deter bad actors by demonstrating that Snapchat is a hostile environment for CSEA. We participate in all major industry and cross-sector hash- and signal-sharing programs, including the Tech Coalition’s Lantern initiative, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) Take It Down program, and Report Remove from the Internet Watch Foundation, and the UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. These programs all help to curb the spread of illegal and violating content across platforms and services.

On the reactive side, we’ve always made blocking and reporting tools available and, in 2023, we added a dedicated reporting reason for sextortion. We’ve made educational resources available in-app, and recently launched a pilot with financial institutions to share potential identifiers used by bad actors. We also take quick action on reports from the many official and unofficial Trusted Flaggers we work with around the world. 

Once we identify suspected CSEA imagery, we take action at the content-, account- and / or device-level per our policies. We report bad actors to NCMEC as required by law, and make proactive referrals to law enforcement in emergencies and other cases where appropriate.

Last year, we added updated in-app warnings to alert teens and young people about possible suspect friend requests, and we regularly add new functionality to our Family Center suite of parental tools.

Finally, last May, we met with NCMEC about improving the quality of our CyberTips with the goal of forwarding to NCMEC and, ultimately, domestic and international law enforcement, reports that are as valuable and actionable as possible.  

We thank DHS for its ongoing collaboration on this important campaign, and we look forward to continuing to work together – along with others across industry, government, and civil society – to wipe out all forms of child sexual exploitation and abuse.         

— Jacqueline Beauchere, Global Head of Platform Safety