“By November 2022, Snap employees will discuss 10,000 user reports of sextortion each month, while acknowledging that, given the stigma and other barriers to reporting, these reports “may represent only a small portion of this abuse.” ‘,” the latest unsealed version of the lawsuit states that the New Mexico Attorney General filed a lawsuit against Snap. The less redacted version of the document, which we first saw a month ago, adds new details about Snap employees’ alleged knowledge of the scope of the sextortion issue Snap is accused of enabling on its platform.
In one alleged example, employees cited a case with 75 reports “mentioning nudity, minors, and extortion, but the account remained active.” By 2022, Snap’s internal research allegedly found that more than one-third of teenage girls and 30% of teenage boys on its app had “experienced unwanted contact on its platform.” the complaint states.
New details paint a picture of a company that was aware of shortcomings in its services to safeguard children but failed to focus enough on addressing them. “Former Snap trust and safety employees complained that ‘they had less contact with senior executives than at other social media companies and encountered resistance when trying to add in-app security because [Snap CEO] Evan Spiegel prioritized design,” the complaint states.
“…attempts to incorporate in-app security met with resistance because [Snap CEO] Evan Spiegel prioritizes design”
In a statement released by its newsroom, Snap said its app was designed as “a place to communicate with your close circle of friends, with built-in safety guardrails and thoughtful design choices that make it difficult for strangers to interact online.” Minors found on the internet.” Our services. We are constantly evolving our security mechanisms and policies, from leveraging advanced technology to detect and block certain activities, to banning suspicious accounts from being friends, to working with law enforcement and government agencies, and more.
According to the complaint, Snap employees circulated an outside report in 2021 that included examples of alleged predators contacting children as young as 8 years old through Snapchat and obtaining child sexual abuse material. But the complaint said they were concerned that measures to capture such behavior would unduly burden user privacy and “result in disproportionate administrative costs.”
Employees also allegedly discovered risks with certain Snapchat features, such as “Quick Add,” which suggests other users to connect. “We need to come up with new ways to contain our most vulnerable users (minors) and make it harder for predatory users to find them through quick add, search, etc.,” one executive wrote, according to the complaint. “We need to come up with new ways to contain our most vulnerable users (minors). We believe that if we adopt new strategies around inventory generation/restrictions and other technologies to more effectively isolate minors from those outside our network, we can achieve this without significantly degrading the product experience for these users. Snap later made it so that the Quick Add feature would only show up on the accounts of 13- to 17-year-olds if they “had a certain number of mutual friends with that person.” But internally, employees realized the approach still had significant flaws, the complaint said.
The unsealed complaint also includes more details about how Snap allegedly facilitated illegal gun sales. In an undated presentation, the company acknowledged that its platform has “50 posts per day related to illegal gun sales, and these sales of weapons receive 9,000 views per day.” Even if the content is reported, “[r]Reported content is often viewed hundreds of times before being reported.
“Streaks prevent you from being able to unplug for a day”
It also included an acknowledgment of Snapstreaks’ addictive internal communications, in which users were told how many days they continued communicating with other users. “Wow, we should have more addictive features like this,” one employee allegedly wrote, according to a January 2017 email. Another wrote: “Most streakers “It’s our core demographic,” an October 2019 presentation said. “Stripes make it impossible to unplug for a day.”
