Last week, Snap hosted a roundtable of 32 representatives from child safety and digital rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Brussels to share our unique approach to safety on Snapchat and to hear their feedback for continued improvement. 

To coincide with our participation in the latest Ministerial Meeting of the EU Internet Forum (EUIF), and along with my European colleagues, I had the pleasure of addressing this esteemed group, and I want to thank those who attended for engaging and sharing their valuable perspectives.

Protecting teens, and indeed, all members of our community is fundamental at Snap. During our meeting, we outlined our overarching safety philosophy, our long-standing adherence to Safety-by-Design product development processes, and ongoing efforts to conduct research and develop features, functionality, tools and resources that help protect Snapchatters around the world.

We showed our new “Less social media, more Snapchat” campaign, which sets out how Snapchat was designed, from the beginning, as an alternative to traditional social media. We recapped our latest six-country Digital Well-Being Index and research, and delved into Family Center, our ever-growing suite of in-app parent and caregiver tools. With so many NGOs focused on various dimensions of child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) online, we also highlighted how – through both proactive and responsive measures – Snap fights back against these vile crimes daily. Indeed, through concerted efforts, our Trust and Safety teams removed some 1.6 million pieces of violating CSEA content last year, disabled accounts, and reported violators to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Our Snap team took away even more ideas and insights to further simplify and improve our support experience, communicate in more teen-friendly language in-app, and consider certain opt-in features for older teens and young adults.

The discussion again highlighted an ongoing safety challenge for all global stakeholders: age assurance and age verification. To continue the dialogue, we look forward to holding similar events in Brussels and are planning a specific follow-up on these topics. We also hope to expand the program to other European and major international capitals. 

Across the tech ecosystem, we all have much to share and learn from one another, and we are eager to grow our cadre of partners and collaborators, all in the service of safety on Snapchat.

— Jacqueline Beauchere, Global Head of Platform Safety