We are committed to making each of our Transparency Reports more comprehensive than the last. It’s a responsibility we don’t take lightly, as we know our stakeholders care as deeply about online safety and accountability as we do. As part of these ongoing efforts, we have made several additions and improvements to our latest Transparency Report, which covers the second half of 2021.

First, we are offering new detail on the amount of content we enforced against drug-related violations. We have zero tolerance for promoting illicit drugs on Snapchat and prohibit the buying or selling of illegal or regulated drugs. 

Over the past year, we have been especially focused on combating the rise of illicit drug activity as part of the larger growing fentanyl and opioid epidemic across the U.S. We take a holistic approach that includes deploying tools that proactively detect drug-related content, working with law enforcement to support their investigations, and providing in-app information and support to Snapchatters through our fentanyl-related education portal, Heads Up. Heads Up surfaces resources from expert organizations when Snapchatters search for a range of drug-related terms and their derivatives. As a result of these ongoing efforts, the vast majority of drug-related content we uncover is proactively detected by our machine learning and artificial intelligence technology, and we will continue working to eradicate drug activity from our platform

When we find activity involving the sale of dangerous drugs, we promptly ban the account, block the offender from creating new accounts on Snapchat, and have the ability to preserve content related to the account to support law enforcement investigations. During this reporting period, seven percent of all content we enforced against globally, and 10 percent of all content we enforced against in the U.S., involved drug-related violations. Globally, the median turnaround time we took action to enforce against these accounts was within 13 minutes of receiving a report.

Second, we have created a new suicide and self-harm category to share the total number of content and account reports that we received and took action on when our Trust & Safety teams determined that a Snapchatter may be in crisis. When our Trust & Safety team recognizes a Snapchatter in distress, they have the option to forward self-harm prevention and support resources, and to notify emergency response personnel where appropriate. We care deeply about the mental health and wellbeing of Snapchatters and believe we have a duty to support our community in these difficult moments. 

In addition to these new elements in our latest Transparency Report, our data shows that we saw a reduction in two key areas: Violative View Rate (VVR) and the number of accounts we enforced that attempted to spread hate speech, violence, or harm. Our current Violative View Rate is (VVR) 0.08 percent. This means that out of every 10,000 Snap and Story views on Snapchat, eight contained content that violated our Community Guidelines. This is an improvement from our last reporting cycle, during which our VVR was 0.10 percent. 

The fundamental architecture of Snapchat protects against the ability for harmful content to go viral, which removes incentives for content that appeals to people’s worst instincts, and limits concerns associated with the spread of bad content such as disinformation, hate speech, self-harm content, or extremism. In the more public parts of Snapchat, such as our Discover content platform and our Spotlight entertainment platform, we curate or pre-moderate content to ensure it complies with our guidelines before it can reach a larger audience. 

We continue to be vigilant to improve our human moderation and as a result, we have improved the median enforcement turnaround time by 25 percent for hate speech and eight percent for threats and violence or harm to 12 minutes in both categories. 

We believe it's our most important responsibility to keep our community safe on Snapchat and we are constantly strengthening our comprehensive efforts to do that. Our work here is never done, but we will continue communicating updates about our progress and we are grateful to our many partners that regularly help us improve.