Snapchat Makes It Harder for Teens to Connect With People They Don't Know
Snapchat has a series of new security features for its youngest users designed to make sure they're primarily interacting with people they know and trust.
The updated features cover three categories for those aged 13 to 17: enhanced privacy, age-appropriate content, and stricter content regulation.
The app already requires teen users to be Snapchat friends or contacts before they can start chatting. But now, a new in-app warning will appear if a user adds a friend who doesn’t share a mutual friend contact or the person isn’t in their contacts.
"When a teen becomes friends with someone on Snapchat, we want to be confident it is someone they know in real life — such as a friend, family member, or other trusted person," Snapchat says.
Meanwhile, 13-17-year-old users are currently required to have several mutual friends before they show up in search results. Snapchat is now increasing this number depending on how many friends the Snapchatter has.
This comes after Snapchat launched a Strike System that will remove inappropriate content from its public Stories and Spotlight platforms. "Under this system, we immediately remove inappropriate content that we proactively detect or that gets reported to us," Snapchat says. "If we see that an account is repeatedly trying to circumvent our rules, we will ban it."
Snapchat also released new in-app content today to help explain the risks of schemes like catfishing, financial sextortion, taking and sharing explicit images, and more. Look for that content on Stories platform and in search results.
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