Teens Are Downloading Snapchat Again. Here’s What A Cybersecurity Expert Says Parents Should Know.

So your teen came home from school today asking to download Snapchat. Maybe you’ve kept them off social media so far, but they’ve had a smartphone for some time now and are generally a good, responsible kid. But you’re aware that social media isn’t all rainbows and butterflies, so you want to know: Is Snapchat safe for teens? Scary Mommy spoke with Ben Gillenwater, aka the Family IT Guy, to find out everything parents should know before saying yes to Snapchat.

Let’s get this out of the way first: He doesn’t think Snapchat is safe for kids or teens. That’s because it has a host of features built into its design that put kids at risk. At risk of what? Addiction to the app (and actual drugs, but we’ll get there), for starters.

There are a few particularly problematic features.

“The first one is addictive algorithms — any system that is designed to maximize how much of your attention it gets.” He acknowledges that pretty much every major social media app is designed to keep users locked in: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and yes, Snapchat. “That problem correlates with a tripling in suicide rates in children between 2007 and 2019, according to the World Health Organization’s mortality database. We’ve never seen rates of anxiety and depression the way we have now because of these algorithms being in kids’ backpacks, bedrooms, and pockets.”

The purpose of algorithms being addictive is to keep our eyeballs — kids and adults alike — on the app’s content. That’s how they make their money: by selling ads and promising advertisers our attention. The addiction is by design, with leaked emails from Snapchat employees confirming their intent to hook users.

“Snap Inc. is an advertising company. They’re not a chat company, they’re not a fun company, they’re not a social media company. They’re an advertising company. They make money by selling ads. One hundred percent of Snap Incorporated’s revenue comes from selling ads,” Gillenwater says.

The downside of this? Studies have found that addictive apps affect kids’ brains just like a drug. Using them has been linked to anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), stress, low self-esteem, social isolation, anger, and diminished psychological well-being.

Issue two: anonymous communication. “Online chat is where predators hunt for kids. They don’t go to the park in the van. They go on a VPN, and they go on Roblox, they go on Instagram, they go on Snapchat, they go on Discord. And that is where your massive trafficking problems come about,” says Gillenwater.

In a recent conversation with Shawna Hoffman, CEO of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), Gillenwater learned that roughly 8 million kids go missing each year globally. Nearly 100% of those cases tie back to the internet in one way or another. In cases of sextortion — in which online predators coerce sexual images out of minors and then blackmail them for money using those images — Snapchat is one of the most common platforms children are exploited on, according to a report from Thorn.

“Snapchat had an internal report a while back that, under their own estimations, they have 10,000 sextortion reports every month, which also says that that number is probably very low because it’s just reports. It’s not incidents,” says Gillenwater. “Snapchat is the No. 1 platform for the online enticement of minors and is the No. 1 secondary destination for sextortion.” (Oftentimes, if predators meet a kid on something like Roblox, then they’ll move to a second channel to communicate.)

Another concern is the Snap Maps feature, which displays a user’s location in real-time, 24/7. “A lot of teenagers keep their Snap Maps enabled, which show their location all the time. It shows where they live. It shows where they go to school. It shows wherever they are right now,” Gillenwater says.

Snapchat now includes an AI chatbot.

Keep kids away from anonymous chats and addictive algorithms — that’s Gillenwater’s advice. When apps with those features add AI capabilities, as Snapchat has done with its My AI chatbot, that only acts as an “accelerant” to their existing harms, he says.

“It analyzes all of your Snapchat activity. It takes all of your conversation transcripts, all of the patterns of interaction, all of your photos, all of your locations, and feeds them into the AI system so that it can learn more about you — because they’re an advertising company. Whatever you think it could do that’s in bad taste and is just invasive, it’s doing,” he says.

In 2023, The Center for Humane Technology set up a Snapchat account posing as a 13-year-old girl. In screenshots posted by the center’s founder, the My AI feature advised her about how to set the mood to have sex with a man 18 years her senior on a “getaway” trip he’d planned for her, as well as how to hide bruises from child protective services investigators.

The Utah Attorney General similarly found that the chatbot has given minors advice on hiding drugs and how to set the mood for sex. The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint to the Department of Justice last year specifically referencing the risks My AI poses to Snapchat’s young users. Gillenwater says the app is nestled in the phones of 90% of Americans ages 13 to 24.

Teen users have been irreparably harmed after using the platform.

Circling back to the IRL drugs now: Snapchat is being sued by 63 families across the U.S. The wrongful death suits allege their children bought drugs laced with fentanyl through dealers using the app to target minors, and as a result, they overdosed.

The National Crime Prevention Council estimates roughly 80% of teen and young adult fentanyl poisoning deaths can be traced back to deals that occurred on social media. Gillenwater says the police, psychologists, and child safety experts he works with refer to Snapchat specifically as “a digital open-air drug market.”

“I interviewed a dad whose son overdosed from drugs that he bought from a drug dealer on Snapchat who was known throughout the whole school,” Gillenwater recalls. “It was a 30-something-year-old man whose entire focus was selling drugs to kids through Snapchat. And [this dad’s] kid bought drugs from this guy, overdosed, and died. Turns out the police had been reporting this guy to Snapchat for a year. They knew that this guy was selling drugs to kids on Snapchat, and they let him keep doing it. The police sent reports that this guy was showing up on school grounds with a gun, selling drugs to kids, and Snapchat left his account alone.”

Jennifer Stout, vice president of global public policy at Snap, told the AP that the company does identify and remove dealers from its platform and that it supports police investigations. “We will continue to do everything we can to tackle this national crisis,” she said.

If you say yes to Snapchat, use the parental controls.

While testifying before the Senate in 2024, Snap’s CEO said that although 20 million U.S. teens use Snapchat, only 200,000 of their accounts have parental controls enabled. Using those features can definitely reduce risks for young users, Gillenwater says. His advice?

• Disable the camera on your child’s phone. “Without a camera, you cannot get sextorted,” he says plainly. To turn off the camera on your child’s iPhone, do so through “Screen Time” in the settings. On Android devices, you can do this via Family Link.
• Enable ghost mode in the Snap parental controls so their location does not appear on Snap Maps.
• While there, set their contacts to “friends only.” Then, your child cannot be contacted by friends of friends or other, distant connections (potential strangers).
• Turn off the quick add feature so your child’s profile doesn’t appear in “people you may know” lists.
• Turn off the My AI chatbot.
• Review your child’s friend list together on a weekly or monthly basis. Ask them if they know each friend in person, and if so, how and where they see them. Anyone who isn’t an IRL contact has to go.

What if your kid is the only one without Snapchat?

You never want your kid to be the one who’s isolated or left out, especially because of something you did, like say no to Snapchat. Sextortion, going missing, drugs — these all sound like super far-fetched possibilities that happen to other people. By comparison, it feels your kid will definitely face some kind of social hurdle for not having this app. But Gillenwater says parents would be surprised how much their children’s social lives improve when they don’t have social media standing in the way.

Michael McLeod, an executive functioning expert and parent coach, has helped more than 500 families eliminate screen addictions. In a conversation with Gillenwater, he shared an interesting outcome for those kids — though they feared they’d lose their social life and connections without the app, the opposite occurred. The connections they had on the app made room for them to spend more time with IRL friends, and they actually felt more socially fulfilled, he says.

“The message there for parents is like, stand strong. You are actually helping your kid in every way, including socially, by disconnecting them from Snapchat,” says Gillenwater.

How can you teach your kid to use social media safely?

One thing we can definitely do is talk to our kids about the permanence of the internet, even when an app swears its content disappears — like images sent on Snapchat.

“The disappearing messages and disappearing photos feature is altogether a lie,” Gillenwater says. They disappear from the users, but Snapchat is in the business of studying that information, and you can tell a lot from a photo. You can tell even more from all the chat messages. And we know that [they keep this data] because the police subpoena Snapchat all the time to get those things and Snapchat gives them, which means they have them. Snap received 25,449 government data requests affecting over 41,000 accounts, and they complied 81% of the time. So they have the data; they keep it.”

Parents should teach their kids to think about it this way, he advises: When you publish an image or your thoughts online, even in a private message, they no longer belong to you. “They will be permanently stored by whoever can touch them, and they will get used in ways that are different from their original intention, even in an environment where they tell you that they’re deleting your stuff.”

This is all…a lot. In a world where everything feels wildly out of control, parents don’t want to hear about yet another way the powers that be are conspiring to hurt kids, Gillenwater acknowledges. What matters, he says, is not thinking in extremes, but the evidence we have.

“Is every kid gonna die if they go on Snapchat? Of course not. Are there lots and lots and lots of stories of, starting point to not that long in the future, there’s damage? Yes. I think that these systems are a net negative. I look at this like the meth of the digital world.”