At Snap, we believe that civic engagement is one of the most powerful forms of self-expression - one of our core values on Snapchat. Ahead of the UK General Election on 4 July, we fully recognise our unique responsibility to mobilise and educate young voters in the lead up to polling day – we reach 90% of 13-24-year-olds and have more than 21 million monthly active users on Snapchat in the UK.

We are proud to have partnered with My Life My Say (MLMS), a youth-focused voter registration non-profit organisation, to support their campaign that encourages young people to ‘Give an X’ about the issues impacting them most, such as renting prices and climate change.

As part of this partnership, Snap developed a special Augmented Reality (AR) election Filter that launched ahead of National Voter Registration Day on 18 June. This contributed to a record-breaking 1.64 million voter registrations of 18-34-year-olds in the UK. The campaign and Filter also saw an incredible 3,000 people registering to vote every five minutes via Snapchat!

As we look ahead to polling day, we have launched an interactive Lens with MLMS that encourages people to get out and vote and directs them to information they may need to cast their vote, such as their local polling station. On 4 July itself, we will also be sharing this Lens with all UK Snapchatters to remind them to vote. 

We are also excited to have teamed up with the BBC, a key news partner for Snap, to launch a countdown AR Filter and generate excitement for polling day. The BBC has a dedicated General Election hub and is a vital information source for voters across the UK — this Filter is linked to the BBC’s voting guide and will help young people navigate the election as well as understand the do’s and don’ts on polling day! Our AR partnership Filter will be shared across the BBC’s channels in the days leading up to 4 July.

This partnership is in addition to a range of media publishers, including The Rest is Politics, The Telegraph, Sky News UK & Sky Breaking News, The Guardian, and The Mirror, who continue to be trusted sources of information for our community to follow and engage in the various developments on the election as they unfold. 

2024 is a global year of elections, as more than 50 countries head to the polls at some point this year, including the UK on 4 July.  At Snap, we set out what we are doing to prepare for these elections earlier this year to help preserve the integrity of elections and protect Snapchatters from misinformation. This update follows our recent EU election blog post which demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.

We are committed to preventing the spread of misinformation. Our Community Guidelines have always prohibited the spread of misinformation and purposefully misleading content – including deepfakes and deceptively manipulated content whether it be AI-generated or created by a human. 

We recognise that misinformation around political parties can spread during an election period and,  although Snap’s platform architecture is designed to prevent the spread of misinformation, we have taken extra steps to keep our community in the UK safe and well-informed. This includes:

• Partnering with Logically Facts, a leading fact-checking organization and a verified signatory of The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), to help fact check political ad statements across the UK.

• Instructing our chatbot, My AI, to avoid engaging on political topics and individuals.

• Setting out a clear policy on political content on Snapchat for UK Snap Stars and providing contact points to escalate any queries related to the election and their posts. 

We are confident that these steps help encourage our community to exercise their right to vote and help keep Snapchat a place for safe, responsible, accurate, and helpful news and information.