The design flaws stem directly from the CEO’s brain:
“Yeah, except we don’t want to be responsible for storing that stuff. Better if they screenshot and email ghostbusters to report.”
Of course predators are drawn to this app. No child should have access to a platform that welcomes predators and deletes evidence. If calling “ghostbusters” is your best chance of reaching customer support, then clearly proper regulations are not in place.
Evan Spiegal has built a small empire on a foundation of sewage. As the father of a teen mentioned in this article, who died four months ago from a Snapchat dealer, I will only feel a sense of relief when this empire finally caves in on itself. Because no child using Snapchat is safe.
Your loss is utterly horrific. I'm so sorry that our society failed your child. The companies that pursued growth & profit over safety and humane policies need to be held accountable.
Thank you. I just had a birthday and have been a bit of a wreck ever since. All of those special days that stand out in a year will be the hardest. Forever.
I think that for any of us who see what’s going on, it is clear that some of these companies will implode (probably starting with Snapchat) and the others will either follow them or fix the issues. It’s up to those of us who know to make sure that this happens as quickly as possible in order to protect as many kids as we can and to help to ensure that a ton of smaller micro companies are not allowed to sprout up as a replacement for nefarious activities.
I fully agree. Hopefully some of the lawsuits discussed above will produced massive judgments that will actually affect their business practices. But the state laws Haidt and his group are pushing--not just phone-free schools but the whole spectrum--are necessary to protect kids from future platforms.
Aaron, I list finished listening to your podcast interview with Nicki Reisberg. I'm just heartbroken for you... I have no idea how you remain so outwardly calm given what you've experienced and what you know, but I'm very confident that your ability to communicate so well about who Avery was, what happened to him, and how these companies operate is going to make a real difference in this fight. It certainly is with parents like me and my wife whose kids are still very little and haven't been exposed to any of this stuff yet. I'll give them an extra hug when they get home today, and will think of Avery when I do. Sending you all the best.
Thank you for this tremendous work in compiling such a detailed exposé of harms. Adding the personal stories of the children who lost their lives to this app is especially important, as talking in numbers and abstractions can make us numb to the terrible real life consequences.
Thanks to your work these companies can no longer feign ignorance of the terrible harms they help cause. Nor can we after reading this.
We need to be shouting from the rooftops the fact that Boston Children's Digital Wellness Lab, ConnectSafely, and the Family Online Safety Institute all receive financial support from Snap, Inc. https://digitalwellnesslab.org/supporters/
But the rot goes even deeper than that. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) collaborated with Michael Rich, founder of the Digital Wellness Lab (which, again, is funded by Snap Inc), on their revised screen time guidelines, which in a major departure from the prior guidelines which recommended limiting screen time to a max of 2 hours for all kids over age 2, no longer recommend any specific screen time limit at all for most children. The guidelines state: "It can be tempting to want a set number of hours on screens that is 'safe' or healthy to guide your family’s technology use. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough evidence demonstrating a benefit from specific screen time limitation guidelines."
Once you connect the dots that the AAP's current screen time guidelines were written by individuals who are on the payroll of Snap Inc., Meta, Roblox, and many others, this all starts to make more sense. So many of our most trusted children's advocacy and health organizations have become financially entangled with the WORST offenders of big tech, and most families do not realize that this is happening. These partnerships between orgs like the AAP and Snap-funded companies like the Digital Wellness Lab represent an appalling conflict of interest. Rather than "following the science," AAP, Digital Wellness Lab, and others have merely become pawns in the Silicon Valley Propaganda Machine.
13% of middle schoolers being on Snapchat seems like a wildly low estimate. I’ve got kids that age and approximately 90% of their friends and schoolmates use Snapchat at their primary means of communication
Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, etc., etc., etc., etc., (even Substack). And not one company has come out to the public with a peep of remorse or genuine desire to change anything, or frankly to even acknowledge a problem. I see nothing that will change this.
The word "enshittifaction" has even been enshrined into the culture, and yet the enshitters themselves remain steadfastly mute. Drives me to distraction. Year after year the public cries out in outrage, and year after year, the companies all remain silent, and skulk to the bank every day to deposit their enormous bags of cash.
It SEEMS like it would be such low-hanging fruit for one of these outfits to publicly address it and make real commitments to change, to be the "good guys" in this swamp. And it SEEMS like such a move would be met with an enormous wave of public gratitude, which they could positively bask in.
But the longer this doesn't happen, the more I'm reminded they aren't in the online platform business, they're in the most-money-possible business. The online platform is just a means to that end. They don't care.
What a horrifically sad story and terrible indictment of Snap’s executive team etc. Sadly not sure this will sufficiently educate/elucidate parents to incentivize them to restrict (or even eliminate) their children’s access to this type of social media. As a society we have bought into total access for all ages and cave to the “tantrums” to keep it up. Although this has taken a tragic toll on so many families it has also adversely impacted the society at large.
People primarily only change for two reasons, pain or a deep desire to improve their circumstances.
Unless the ‘tech-overlords’ feel some sort of pain (including public shame) they will not change anything about how their companies are run and the harm will horrifically continue.
We know they don’t need to change their circumstances so the second reason won’t be a driver for change.
Thanks for taking an enormous effort to produce this sobering deep dive Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch - the truth needs to be known and acted on so we can expose these nefarious organisations that comprise of people whose moral compasses are broken and led by those who likely didn’t have one to start with.
I completely agree. Any significant amount of public shame though is going to require tech-overlord enablers like National Parent Teacher Association, Girl Scouts, Boston Children's Digital Wellness Lab, and Common Sense Media, all of whom are financially entangled with social media companies, to start speaking out AGAINST these companies' ongoing exploitation of our kids. Once "digital safety trainings" for families hosted by these very orgs become more about informing parents of harms vs encouraging "safe use" (impossible with the way the platforms are designed), maybe the tide will start to change.
I wasn't aware of the incestuous relationship between these supposedly helpful organisations and the tech-overlords @Christina Dinur - this makes the situation even more distressing and sobering. I harp on about our opportunistic, age-defined windows of brain development to anyone who will listen, and have written about it here in Substack too, but humans are poor at preventing problems and instead end up trying to solve them after the fallout.
This is a story grounded in greed and hubris. Evan Spiegel needs metrics that support the Snapchat valuation so that he can live his extraordinarily lavish lifestyle.
It would be interesting to see how quickly these problems are solved if an exposé of his lifestyle is made . Especially if it is juxtaposed with the harm done to children (and adults) to support it.
I will never understand for the life of me how some of the same self-described “mama bears” who think every man walking around Target is a sex trafficker trying to steal their kids, or who obsess over carseats and keeping kids rear facing until they get training bras and razors, or would never dream of letting their children walk around the block alone, will hand their kids internet-connected devices and then stroll off. It’s like the Gen Zers sardonically say: “My parents were afraid of letting me go outside because of stranger danger so they put me on the internet where all the predators are.”
It's so helpful and harrowing to see the evidence "clustered" in this way. Hats off to the AG team for this level of documentation.
One of the fixes that seems years overdue is an on-device nudity prevention toggle that could be enabled and locked in by parents. The tech to do this has existed for years. Even Apple has something like this in place with Communication Safety in Screen Time.
Snapchat is a turbo-charged, dopamine-filled, neurological beast for teen brains. We all know how easily it weaponizes tween and teen impulsivity. Snap knows it, too. The lack of this kind of commonsense prevention tool to stop kids from making instant, life-changing choices with their risk-taking brain, to me, has always seemed an admission by omission from them that they condone this type of illegal behavior (it's CSAM).
Simple elegant solution for apps like this, require a credit card charge for one cent and refund of one cent. This requires name on account to match name on credit card. It also ensures kids can't cheat, use mom's card and she sees the transaction.
Whatever the dangers of snapchat are, parents have to be informed in the first place about the device that offers their children the possibility to watch: cellphones...
...and the negative effects caused by high-frequency EMF on the brain development of children and adolescents.
The design flaws stem directly from the CEO’s brain:
“Yeah, except we don’t want to be responsible for storing that stuff. Better if they screenshot and email ghostbusters to report.”
Of course predators are drawn to this app. No child should have access to a platform that welcomes predators and deletes evidence. If calling “ghostbusters” is your best chance of reaching customer support, then clearly proper regulations are not in place.
Evan Spiegal has built a small empire on a foundation of sewage. As the father of a teen mentioned in this article, who died four months ago from a Snapchat dealer, I will only feel a sense of relief when this empire finally caves in on itself. Because no child using Snapchat is safe.
Your loss is utterly horrific. I'm so sorry that our society failed your child. The companies that pursued growth & profit over safety and humane policies need to be held accountable.
Thank you. I just had a birthday and have been a bit of a wreck ever since. All of those special days that stand out in a year will be the hardest. Forever.
I think that for any of us who see what’s going on, it is clear that some of these companies will implode (probably starting with Snapchat) and the others will either follow them or fix the issues. It’s up to those of us who know to make sure that this happens as quickly as possible in order to protect as many kids as we can and to help to ensure that a ton of smaller micro companies are not allowed to sprout up as a replacement for nefarious activities.
I fully agree. Hopefully some of the lawsuits discussed above will produced massive judgments that will actually affect their business practices. But the state laws Haidt and his group are pushing--not just phone-free schools but the whole spectrum--are necessary to protect kids from future platforms.
Aaron, I list finished listening to your podcast interview with Nicki Reisberg. I'm just heartbroken for you... I have no idea how you remain so outwardly calm given what you've experienced and what you know, but I'm very confident that your ability to communicate so well about who Avery was, what happened to him, and how these companies operate is going to make a real difference in this fight. It certainly is with parents like me and my wife whose kids are still very little and haven't been exposed to any of this stuff yet. I'll give them an extra hug when they get home today, and will think of Avery when I do. Sending you all the best.
That extra hug means the world to me. Thank you so much for this ❤️🥹
Christ, my sympathies and my heart go out to you. I can't even begin to imagine what you at going through
Thank you for this tremendous work in compiling such a detailed exposé of harms. Adding the personal stories of the children who lost their lives to this app is especially important, as talking in numbers and abstractions can make us numb to the terrible real life consequences.
Thanks to your work these companies can no longer feign ignorance of the terrible harms they help cause. Nor can we after reading this.
We need to be shouting from the rooftops the fact that Boston Children's Digital Wellness Lab, ConnectSafely, and the Family Online Safety Institute all receive financial support from Snap, Inc. https://digitalwellnesslab.org/supporters/
https://connectsafely.org/about-us/supporters/
https://fosi.org/
But the rot goes even deeper than that. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) collaborated with Michael Rich, founder of the Digital Wellness Lab (which, again, is funded by Snap Inc), on their revised screen time guidelines, which in a major departure from the prior guidelines which recommended limiting screen time to a max of 2 hours for all kids over age 2, no longer recommend any specific screen time limit at all for most children. The guidelines state: "It can be tempting to want a set number of hours on screens that is 'safe' or healthy to guide your family’s technology use. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough evidence demonstrating a benefit from specific screen time limitation guidelines."
https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/qa-portal/qa-portal-library/qa-portal-library-questions/screen-time-guidelines
Once you connect the dots that the AAP's current screen time guidelines were written by individuals who are on the payroll of Snap Inc., Meta, Roblox, and many others, this all starts to make more sense. So many of our most trusted children's advocacy and health organizations have become financially entangled with the WORST offenders of big tech, and most families do not realize that this is happening. These partnerships between orgs like the AAP and Snap-funded companies like the Digital Wellness Lab represent an appalling conflict of interest. Rather than "following the science," AAP, Digital Wellness Lab, and others have merely become pawns in the Silicon Valley Propaganda Machine.
13% of middle schoolers being on Snapchat seems like a wildly low estimate. I’ve got kids that age and approximately 90% of their friends and schoolmates use Snapchat at their primary means of communication
Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, etc., etc., etc., etc., (even Substack). And not one company has come out to the public with a peep of remorse or genuine desire to change anything, or frankly to even acknowledge a problem. I see nothing that will change this.
The word "enshittifaction" has even been enshrined into the culture, and yet the enshitters themselves remain steadfastly mute. Drives me to distraction. Year after year the public cries out in outrage, and year after year, the companies all remain silent, and skulk to the bank every day to deposit their enormous bags of cash.
It SEEMS like it would be such low-hanging fruit for one of these outfits to publicly address it and make real commitments to change, to be the "good guys" in this swamp. And it SEEMS like such a move would be met with an enormous wave of public gratitude, which they could positively bask in.
But the longer this doesn't happen, the more I'm reminded they aren't in the online platform business, they're in the most-money-possible business. The online platform is just a means to that end. They don't care.
YouTube needs to be part of this conversation. It is available on school issued Chromebooks and a major vector of ideas that are harmful to youth.
At this point, it just needs to be shut down entirely.
We need everyone to read this, what a comprehensive, damning, and horrific account. Thank you for doing this work, even if it feels Sisyphian.
What a horrifically sad story and terrible indictment of Snap’s executive team etc. Sadly not sure this will sufficiently educate/elucidate parents to incentivize them to restrict (or even eliminate) their children’s access to this type of social media. As a society we have bought into total access for all ages and cave to the “tantrums” to keep it up. Although this has taken a tragic toll on so many families it has also adversely impacted the society at large.
Snap is bad, but bad parenting is also responsible. I got through the 90s without a phone. Kids these days can do it too.
Get your kids a flip/dumb phone if they need to text. Less risk.
People primarily only change for two reasons, pain or a deep desire to improve their circumstances.
Unless the ‘tech-overlords’ feel some sort of pain (including public shame) they will not change anything about how their companies are run and the harm will horrifically continue.
We know they don’t need to change their circumstances so the second reason won’t be a driver for change.
Thanks for taking an enormous effort to produce this sobering deep dive Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch - the truth needs to be known and acted on so we can expose these nefarious organisations that comprise of people whose moral compasses are broken and led by those who likely didn’t have one to start with.
I completely agree. Any significant amount of public shame though is going to require tech-overlord enablers like National Parent Teacher Association, Girl Scouts, Boston Children's Digital Wellness Lab, and Common Sense Media, all of whom are financially entangled with social media companies, to start speaking out AGAINST these companies' ongoing exploitation of our kids. Once "digital safety trainings" for families hosted by these very orgs become more about informing parents of harms vs encouraging "safe use" (impossible with the way the platforms are designed), maybe the tide will start to change.
I wasn't aware of the incestuous relationship between these supposedly helpful organisations and the tech-overlords @Christina Dinur - this makes the situation even more distressing and sobering. I harp on about our opportunistic, age-defined windows of brain development to anyone who will listen, and have written about it here in Substack too, but humans are poor at preventing problems and instead end up trying to solve them after the fallout.
This is a story grounded in greed and hubris. Evan Spiegel needs metrics that support the Snapchat valuation so that he can live his extraordinarily lavish lifestyle.
It would be interesting to see how quickly these problems are solved if an exposé of his lifestyle is made . Especially if it is juxtaposed with the harm done to children (and adults) to support it.
I will never understand for the life of me how some of the same self-described “mama bears” who think every man walking around Target is a sex trafficker trying to steal their kids, or who obsess over carseats and keeping kids rear facing until they get training bras and razors, or would never dream of letting their children walk around the block alone, will hand their kids internet-connected devices and then stroll off. It’s like the Gen Zers sardonically say: “My parents were afraid of letting me go outside because of stranger danger so they put me on the internet where all the predators are.”
It's so helpful and harrowing to see the evidence "clustered" in this way. Hats off to the AG team for this level of documentation.
One of the fixes that seems years overdue is an on-device nudity prevention toggle that could be enabled and locked in by parents. The tech to do this has existed for years. Even Apple has something like this in place with Communication Safety in Screen Time.
Snapchat is a turbo-charged, dopamine-filled, neurological beast for teen brains. We all know how easily it weaponizes tween and teen impulsivity. Snap knows it, too. The lack of this kind of commonsense prevention tool to stop kids from making instant, life-changing choices with their risk-taking brain, to me, has always seemed an admission by omission from them that they condone this type of illegal behavior (it's CSAM).
Simple elegant solution for apps like this, require a credit card charge for one cent and refund of one cent. This requires name on account to match name on credit card. It also ensures kids can't cheat, use mom's card and she sees the transaction.
this is a really sad read. could BeReal be a safer alternative?
Whatever the dangers of snapchat are, parents have to be informed in the first place about the device that offers their children the possibility to watch: cellphones...
...and the negative effects caused by high-frequency EMF on the brain development of children and adolescents.
Interview with neurobiologist Karen Grafen: https://multerland.blog/2025/03/07/the-negative-effects-of-high-frequency-emf-on-the-brain-development-of-children-and-adolescents/