Predators of Snapchat

Snapchat is among most used social media in the past 10 years. It has over one billion downloads and is majorly used by younger populations. And as every widely used online tool even Snapchat comes with its own dangerous. Yes I am talking about predators of Snapchat.

I've been a user of Snapchat since 2015. Pretty late to join the party. I have been mostly using it for communication with my foreign friends. But in May of 2023 somehow after the app update I ended in the Quick Add algorithm of the app. And suddenly I have started to receive up to 80 friends requests per day. Normal I would have just removed myself from algorithm and ignore the messages that came in. But after I mistakenly opened two of them I was triggered to say the least.

I expect messages to start with: "hi", "how are you", "hello, my name is...", "hi, I added you"... But I was very mistaken with these thoughts. Most of the massages started with these following questions: "how old are you", "can you send me your picture", "do you want to be my sugar baby", "are you looking for a hot d*** ***"... Keep in mind the fact I have non of my personal informations posted on Snapchat or any other social media platform and that I haven't talked to these people beforehand (yes, to my surprise among these people were both men and women). After that I started to actually look into messages I have received. And I was beyond shocked to see what seems to be a normal way of chatting on Snapchat. In the arms of being anonymous and hard to discover the lines of sexual, verbal and emotional abuse seem to be lost. Following by threats, dangerous dares and scams. In most of the cases people forget all about morality, politeness and primal respect for other beings. It truly does feel like it is a place where world has gone mad.

After seeing how things work I was curies where do boundaries exist? So I started my own little social experiment. I created three women to see how people will react thourds them.

First one (we will call her Modul 1) was a 14 years old girl. She is single and she has just finished 9th grade. Second one (we will call her Modul 2) was a 17 years old girl. She is single and she is in high school.

Third one (we will call her Modul 3) was a 28 years old girl. She is in a long term relationship, is employed and is working on her PhD.

Now allow me to explain why I choose those specific modules. A 14 year old is here by law still under all restrictions and decisions of parents. If he/she commits a criminal action, parents will be responsible for it. And also if being sexualy harrast, the person harrasing is considered to be a pedofile which is punishable by law. A17 year old girl is still an underaged child, but can hold some criminal responsibility. Usually they are in the faze of exploring social life and can be quite moody. But also when being sexualy harrast, the person doing it is "only" cosidered to be a molester by law. When 28 years old woman presents a grown up population either in a faze of looking for a partner or in a phase of settling down and creating a family. And a law gets a lot more losse in a case of sexual harassments of adults.

In my experiment I talked to 100 people who added me on Quick Add. I took different approaches to the chats based on what have I learned from their profiles. The informations that I was collecting were:

- reviewing their number of sent snaps,

- understanding their username (if a profile was named horny_guy222 I decided for a different approach than for profiles that had "normal" usernames),

- seeing what all did they have uploaded on their public stories,

-and did they had a bitmoji or not.

Here is the statistic I have encountered during these talks. It inclued 100 people.

Among a hundred people, I encountered this topics or events:

• Ignored - people either stopped replying or never even opened my repay

• Verbal harassment - nasty words, verbal bullying, threats

• Refused to stop - the messaging continued even after clearly being asked to stop

• Call harassment - continuous calls even after being told to stop

• Nude pictures

• Sex videos

• Suggar ddady offeres - men offering money in return for pictures, time spent with them, videos...

• Apology and mature talk - talking to a person either in a mature talk that was enjoyable or received an apology after being told that I am not feeling comfortable

As you can see from the statistics the verbal harassments and sexuality of the chats happens in over 50 % of the cases. Where the mature talk with basic rules of respect and politeness that you would have expected from a stranger seems something almost forgotten. To my happiness (as much as in such discovery there can be) people still do tend to reconsider their actions a bit more when it comes to minores. When most of the teen population with young adults present almost close to no boundaries. The people I talked to were in big variety of ages within 16 to 58 years old.

But that has opened a new questions for me. Does it mean that today's society has lost a sense of primal respect or is this a new reality by objectify people and harassing them being hidden behind anonymes profiles over the internet? And if so, where does it, if it even does end?