New Snapchat safety rules for under-16 users

Snapchat is rolling out new content-sharing protections for 13- to 15-year-old users.

The platform announced Wednesday that younger teens will get a "friends-only" experience for their Spotlight posts. That public feed consists of vertical videos short-form similar to Instagram Reels or TikTok.

The new rules make Spotlight content posted by 13- to 15-year-olds visible only to the user's mutually accepted friends. Previously, under-16 users could post to Spotlight, without attribution to their profile.

"This allowed teens to participate, while helping to protect them from potentially unwanted contact that can come with public posting," the Snap Company said in its announcement.

Now younger Snapchatters will get a space on their profile for creating, saving, and sharing Stories and Spotlight Videos with only their mutually accepted friends. Teens ages 16 and 17 can share content publicly with some safeguards.

"This new experience is designed to encourage creativity and self-expression within a trusted audience," the company said.

Age checking on Snapchat

Currently, Snapchat relies on self-attested age and age inference, but safety advocates generally say social media platforms need high-quality age assurance to ensure their safety measures are effective.

When Mashable tested Snapchat's age attestation prior to the announcement, we found that Snapchat defaulted user age to 18 years old.

With the new policy, if Snapchat determines a user is under 16, despite their stated age, that minor will be shifted into the friends-only sharing setting. That change will appear in the Snapchat app if they choose to post a Spotlight video.

Snapchat safety concerns

Last week, the advocacy groups Heat Initiative, Anxious Generation, ParentsTogether Action, and Design It 4 Us published the results of a survey of teen Snapchat users, alleging that the platform's safety measures aren't effective enough.

A third of the poll's 1,016 respondents said they'd seen or received unsafe content or messages in the past week. More than half said they'd had at least one such experience in the past year.

The top three types of dangerous experiences reported by up to a third of teens were unwanted contact, bullying, and sexually suggestive content and messages. More than 40 percent of respondents who'd received unwanted messages believed the sender was an adult.

A Snap Company spokesperson told Mashable that the report "does not fully reflect the significant investments Snap has made to help protect young people."

In the blog post Snap published Wednesday, the company noted that it works to prevent the delivery of friend requests from potential strangers, and that the platform doesn't allow teens to be messaged by anyone they haven't added as a friend or who's not in their phone contacts. Additionally, when teens accept a stranger as a friend, Snapchat is designed to send warnings when minors begin chatting with that user.

Snapchat has been the target of youth safety activism and the target of legal action, like many major social media platforms. In January, Snap settled a lawsuit brought by a teenager who claimed that Snapchat's design features, like algorithmic recommendations, led to addictive use and mental health harms. Soon after, Snap introduced new parental controls for teens.