Inside messages among employees at Snapchat, the popular camera messaging app that primarily teens and young adults use, demonstrates how the organization knowingly targets and harms young people. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of the bestselling book The Anxious Generation, published a Substack article last week detailing how Snap Inc, the owner of Snapchat, receives thousands of reports about “sextortion” each month.

Haidt and his research partner, Zach Rausch, write,

Following the format of our previous post about the “industrial scale harms” attributed to TikTok, this piece presents dozens of quotations from internal reports, studies, memos, conversations, and public statements in which Snap executives, employees, and consultants acknowledge and discuss the harms that Snapchat causes to many minors who use their platform. We group these findings into five key clusters of harms:

1. Addictive, Compulsive, and Problematic Use
2. Drugs and Guns
3. Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), Sextortion, and In-person Sexual Predation and Assault
4. Cyberbullying
5. Knowledge of Harm and Underage Use, and Lack of Action

Similar to TikTok, we show that company insiders were aware of multiple widespread and serious harms, and in many cases did not act promptly or make substantial changes.

The authors go on to discuss their findings in detail, and the revelations are grim. As stated above, executives at Big Tech companies are oftentimes totally aware of how their product hurts users. The 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma features a number of former Big Tech executives who now forbid their own children to own smartphones because they know the risk. If the pioneers of these devices won’t even give it to their own kids, why should the typical American parent?

The “streak” is one of Snapchat’s tactics to keep people active on the app. After users send pictures to each other three days in a row, a number appears to keep track of how many days the streak is alive. I know people who have thousand-day-long streaks with their friends, which amounts to multiple years of this sort of communication. Not only that, but sometimes people who hardly know each other snap every single day just to keep the streak going. It’s a clever and effective model that makes Snapchat quite addicting. Losing a streak, for the hyperconnected fifteen-year-old, may feel tantamount to losing a friendship. Snapchat, though, is a superficial communication app at best. It offers users an ephemeral photo but falls way short of a real conversation and in-person connection. Like any social media product, it is an imperfect substitute for the real thing.

Haidt and Rausch’s report is worth reading in full, along with their excoriation of TikTok’s similar internal admissions of harm. As lawsuits continue to stir and popular opinion begins to tilt against these powerful technological monopolies, perhaps more people will find the freedom and direction to escape from digital addiction.