Safety at Snap
Snapchat was designed to help people communicate with their close friends in an environment that prioritizes their safety and privacy. Here are some key things to know about how we work to keep students safe on Snapchat.
Safety Features for Teens
Community Guidelines
Snapchat’s Community Guidelines are a clear set of rules that help Snapchatters use the app safely. Our Guidelines explicitly prohibit bullying or harassing others, sharing sexually explicit content of oneself or others, spreading false information, engaging in criminal activity like threatening violence or buying or selling drugs, and more. We apply additional moderation to our public content platforms to help prevent content that violates our rules from reaching a large audience.
We have strict penalties for people who violate our policies. Our Safety teams work around the clock to review reports and take the appropriate action, which can include warning users, removing content, banning accounts, blocking devices, and escalating reports to law enforcement.
For severe offenses – like using Snapchat to engage in illegal activity (such as child sexual exploitation or attempted distribution of illicit drugs), severe bullying or harassment, or threatening to cause physical harm – we disable the offending account and take measures to prevent the user from getting back on Snapchat. For other violations of our Community Guidelines, we apply a “strike” system. Snapchatters accrue strikes for violations of the Community Guidelines, and if a Snapchatter accrues too many strikes over a defined period of time, their account will be disabled.
You can read more about how to submit a report – either directly in the app or online for those who don’t have a Snapchat account – in the downloadable handout here.
Breakdown of Our Key Protections
We offer extra protections for teens to help keep the focus on connecting with close friends, preventing unwanted contact from strangers, and providing an age-appropriate content experience. We also empower teens – and all Snapchatters – with easy-to-use tools for reporting a safety concern directly to us and blocking accounts engaging in unwanted or inappropriate contact.
Reporting is confidential on Snapchat; we don’t tell Snapchatters who reported them. We also offer online reporting tools that you don’t need a Snapchat account to use.
Protections Against Unwanted Contact
Our goal is to make it hard for young people to be contacted by people they don’t know, and Snapchat has unique protections designed to make it harder for strangers to find or communicate with teens:
Friend lists for all Snapchatters are private, which reduces social pressure and restricts strangers and friends alike from easily seeing a person’s social circle.
Snapchatters must accept each other as friends or have each other in their phone contacts before they can begin communicating directly.
Snapchat makes it hard for a teen to surface as a suggested friend or in search results for another user unless, for example, they have mutual friends or the teen is in the other’s phone contacts.
We have enhanced friending protections that prevent the delivery of certain suspicious friend requests, making it harder for strangers to find and add teens.
If teens accept a friend request and receive a message from someone that we think they may not know, we send an in-app warning to help make sure they want to be in contact and to remind them to only communicate with people they trust.
Strict Location Settings
Location-sharing can be an important safety tool and helps friends stay connected, and we encourage teens to make informed choices with regard to location-sharing by:
Turning location-sharing off by default, meaning that Snapchatters have to proactively opt in to share their location with anyone
Allowing Snapchatters to share their location only with their existing Snapchat friends – there is no option to broadcast their location to the wider Snapchat community.
Sending reminders to make sure that Snapchatters are always up to date on which friends they’re sharing their location with
Giving Snapchatters a single destination to see exactly which friends they are sharing their location with, update their location settings, and remove their location from the map.
Quick and Simple Blocking & Reporting Tools
We offer easy ways for teens to block any person they no longer want to be in contact with, and to confidentiality report a safety concern to us directly in the app. Reports go straight to our safety and moderation teams, who work 24/7 to take appropriate action. Even though conversations on Snapchat delete by default, we retain data while we review reports.
Zero Tolerance for Severe Harms
We have zero tolerance for people who violate our rules by committing severe offenses, such as causing serious physical or emotional harm to another Snapchatter. If we discover this type of behavior, we quickly disable their accounts and apply measures to prevent them from getting back on Snapchat. We also escalate emergencies to law enforcement and work to support their investigations.
Snapchat is Only for Teens Ages 13+
Teens must be at least 13 to create a Snapchat account. If we become aware that an account belongs to a person under 13, we terminate their account from the platform and delete their data.
It’s critical that your teen signs up with an accurate birthday so they can benefit from our safety protections for teens. To help prevent teens from circumventing these safeguards, we don’t allow 13-17- year-olds with existing Snapchat accounts to change their birth year to an age of 18 or above.
Parental Tools
We encourage schools to share Family Center – Snapchat’s set of parental tools – with the parents and guardians of their students.
Just as Snapchat was built to help people communicate with their friends in the same way they would in real life, Family Center reflects the dynamics of real-world relationships between parents and teens, where parents have insight into who their teens are spending time with, without providing a full transcript of those conversations.
Specifically, caregivers using Family Center can:
See who their teen is friends with and who they’ve been recently communicating with and who has been communicating with them
Use content controls – which are on by default – to filter out sensitive or suggestive content from publishers or creators in Stories or Spotlight
Easily and confidentially report concerns directly to our Trust & Safety team
See if, and how often, their teens are chatting with My AI, and restrict the ability for My AI to respond
See if their teen is sharing their location with friends on the Snap Map.
Educators can find, download and distribute our Family Center Guide here. If you’d like information to include in parent outreach materials, you can find a graphic outlining where parents can find information and support here.
