Snapchat: Good for teenagers?

Snapchat: Good for teenagers?

A lot of youth workers have been asking me about Snapchat, a mobile picture sharing service that is popular amongst some segments of teenagers. 

I know there are some innocent uses out there. I’ve even heard from youth ministry folks who use it to connect with their students and crowd-source ideas. But I also know of some horror stories. Stories of regret and exposure to things their eyes didn’t want to see. 

Rather than respond to specific things I like or dislike about the service I think it’s better to respond with a few principles I’ve taught teenagers, parents, and youth workers for years.

  1. Everyone isn’t who you think they are online. Just ask Manti Te’o. Unless you are 100% confident that you know every single one of your Snapchat friends and they know every one of their Snapchat friends, you don’t really know who is seeing the pictures you are sending nor can you predict what you are likely to be sent.
  2. Anonymity, or perceived anonymity, never benefits teenagers. There have been hundreds of studies done about how far humans will go to punish, humiliate, and harm fellow human beings when they perceive they are inflicting harm anonymously. The most famous of which is the Milgram experiment. I’ve seen it time and again: Anonymity among teenagers leads to cyberbullying, pure and simple. When I first looked into Snapchat I thought it was another experiment, like Chatroulette was. And in fact, I’m still not sure if it’s real or if it’s another Stanford experiment… It’s just too obviously set up to gain the trust of teenagers while attracting men looking for porn to be real. It’s not hard for a grown man to pose as a 15 year old female on Snapchat. And if it isn’t hard, you know that’s what’s going on.
  3. There is no such thing as anonymity anywhere online. When I listen to teenagers talk about this service they seem to like the innocence and cuteness of it. It all just kind of goes away. Awesome. Unfortunately, everywhere your device goes online has the ability to be tracked back to you. (Relatively easily) A service can say something is anonymous and they can have intentions of keeping that private. But if a law is broken, say you see a nude picture of an underage friend, all of your usage data is able to be seen by the courts for your prosecution. Ask Kwame Kilpatrick about that. While Snapchat tries to convince users otherwise the proof is right in their privacy policy… they store everything for their own purposes and will give it out however they need to. The privacy policy details how they store your UDID, (device ID) email, phone number, MAC address, (network identifier) and all your usage data… which images you looked at, how long you saw them, if you touched the screen while you looked at it, etc.
  4. Nothing you post online goes away. Ever. Forget the marketing copy, it’s a lie. That’s just not how the internet works. A service can say it isn’t storing images but it is stored, indexed, and potentially sold. Again, the Snapchat privacy policy makes it abundantly clear that they are storing everything and will use it however it best benefits their investors within the law. Think of it like this… if I could convince you to post lots of photos of yourself which I could then use for any purpose I wanted whenever I wanted… why would I ever delete that? I wouldn’t. I’d store it and potentially use it later. And when you’re 25 and you apply for a job that does a background check, guess who is going to be seeing your embarrassing 10 year old photos? Yup, thems the breaks kid. COPPA only protects you until you’re 13. After that you can identify your flirty Snapchat self with the non-flirty MBA self trying to get a government job. Additionally, they are legally obligated to store every-single-image because if a law is broken and they’ve deleted evidence they may be criminally responsible. So they can say they are deleting stuff all they want, but they are storing it all. 
  5. Things aren’t always as innocent as they appear online. Snapchat is a service targeted at 13-17 year old females. All of their promotional materials are out of casting central for a Disney Channel-esque television show. Who do you think are the vast majority of users? I’m going to guess men. Snapchat is like bait for a To Catch a Predator episode. When it was first described to me I wondered if Chris Hanson occasionally popped up and said, “Hello there Joe. I’m Chris Hanson from Dateline NBC. Can I ask you what you’re doing here?

I’ve been soft on responding about Snapchat because there hasn’t been a lot of data to back up my assumptions about the site. But I do want to point out that based on all the experience I have in working with digitally connected teenagers, all of the principles that I teach should navigate any and all students away from using this app.

Are there innocent uses? Certainly. Am I being alarmist? That’s not my style. I just don’t see the positive outweighing the negative.

All Snapchat appears to be is a teenage version of Chatroullette. It might be used innocently. But it’ll also lull you into to taking bigger and bigger risks until its too late. There’s just no upside to it. Cute and fun? I am not buying it.

What’s an alternative and why? Instead of Snapchat I’d recommend Instagram, a photo-sharing service with a more open sharing community and a proven abuse desk via Facebook.

My encouragement to students, parents, and youth workers is to help teenagers find a better platform for connecting than Snapchat. Too many unknowns and built too easily for exploitation.

Learn More

Ready to dig into all of my social media principles? They’re covered in my book, A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media. I’m also available for bookings throughout the United States. 


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40 responses to “Snapchat: Good for teenagers?”

  1. Matthew McNutt Avatar

    Ug. I’m not thrilled with SnapChat at all. People are calling it the perfect sexting app since it deletes the photos a few seconds after viewing them … but already websites are popping up with the naked photos people are sending each other that the recipient does a screen capture with and manages to save before it disappears. Sure, SnapChat notifies the sender that the other person did a screen capture, but it doesn’t change the fact that they can’t take it back and now it’s out there forever.

    1. Chris Szulwach Avatar

      You don’t even need to do a screen capture. Many times the images will remain in the temp memory of the device until powered off so the device can be connected to a computer and the images retrieved.

      1. Jmgreenhill Avatar
        Jmgreenhill

        I read an article the other day on a tech site that said mentioned that images and videos were stored locally on the phone until viewed.(not to mention until the phone is powered off and screen captures) The article stated that a simple file manager app could move everything to a computer before it’s viewed and “deleted”.

    2. Adam McLane Avatar

      A quick read of their TOS will reveal what’s really going on here.

  2. Tom Shriver Avatar

    I have mixed feelings on SnapChat. I actually just informed some of my parents that this even existed on Sunday and they were shocked. I have SnapChat. I snap with my friends, family, and even youth. I try to promote it as a positive picture sharing tool. It can be a ton of fun and is a great way to stay connected with youth, but it can also lead to sexting and all that bad stuff…but so can texting. I think it’s good for us to use SnapChat and promote it as a fun way to communicate rather than a free sexting service.

    1. Adam McLane Avatar

      The difference is between SMS and a web service. SMS is regulated… when I send a text to you I am ensured that you alone get it. When you post something to a webserver and give a friend access to it, you’re actually storing it on the sites server forever. That’s a big, important difference. Looks like SMS, acts like SMS, but isn’t SMS.

      Just food for thought.

      1. Tom Shriver Avatar

        Definitely. Good thoughts, Adam.

  3. JasonChenoweth Avatar
    JasonChenoweth

    Adam,

    Thanks for the feedback. I was talking with my 14 year old daughter this morning about Snapchat. I’m very pro social media, but this one is a set up for failure. I’m going to forward the article on to all of my parents. Thanks man!

    1. Adam McLane Avatar

      Thanks Jason. I was really cautious about writing this post. But you know me… I don’t do alarmist stuff. But it seems like this one is set-up as a snare for any teenager. Best bet would be to use Instagram or even Facebook’s knockoff to Snapchat… Poke.

  4. David Hausknecht Avatar

    Adam, I thought this was a great response. I will also be sharing this with some parents. Thank you!

  5. Nathan Davis Avatar

    This is great man. I’ve been wondering about this app for a bit, glad you did the work to give us the details. Thanks!

  6. Christopher Wesley Avatar

    I get frustrated by all the social media content I have to keep on; however, we’ve already had an incident in our community involving Snapchat. I have one volunteer helping me look at beneficial uses of it like sending students promptings to look at a scripture verse; however, that’ll only work if they have a healthy relationship outside of social media.

    Great post, thanks for laying out your thoughts.

  7. Lee Barnes Avatar
    Lee Barnes

    We have discovered that Snapchat is the most popular sexting app in the Triangle area of NC…Thanks for your post

    1. Adam McLane Avatar

      Boo for the sexting. But glad you guys are out ahead of it resourcing parents. Let me know if I can help.

  8. Luke McFadden Avatar

    Interesting to signup, and see which all of my youth are using it through the find friends feature. Thanks Adam.

  9. Brian Avatar
    Brian

    Good stuff Adam…thanks!

  10. Carl Fuglein Avatar

    Having been an innocent victim of something like this (many years ago), I was solicited by someone posing as a 16 year old teenage girl. I didn’t bite, not my nature. But I found out later it was an internet “friend”. Be careful out there. The Internet is like the wild west.

  11. […] Snapchat: Good for Teenagers?. […]

  12. […] My good friend Adam McLane, author of A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media, just happened to blog about this yesterday as well and offers 5 insightful principles for parents, teenagers and youth workers to consider. […]

  13. […] a look at this blog post from a great Youth Ministry thinker, Adam Mclane, about Snapchat.  Also, Adam has written a book […]

  14. Mike Andrews Avatar

    Bottom line for me is similar to what you said… there’s just not enough of an upside to bother dancing around the fire.

  15. […] Snapchat: Good for Teenagers by Adam Mclane. I like what Adam does in this post. Instead of just sharing his likes and dislikes of Snapchat, he reminds teens and parents of some important principles to remember when online. These principles are excellent for parents to talk through with their teens. […]

  16. […] make these bad decisions.  With the rise of camera phones came the rise of sexting and the new app Snapchat.  With the rise of social media comes the rise of cyberbullying and other such misuses of the […]

  17. […] You are the product. The only reason Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and yes… innocent little Snapchat even exist is to collect data from you about you so that these companies can turn around and sell […]

  18. Faithjones Avatar
    Faithjones

    How come I can’t Sign up to the snapchat that has the yellow background and a white ghost on it

  19. […] Read Adam’s full article here. […]

  20. […] I’ve been engaged in various forms of social media since AOL chat rooms in 1994. And I’ve never seen a more dangerous application targeting teenagers, specifically girls, than SnapChat. […]

  21. […] I’ve been engaged in various forms of social media since AOL chat rooms in 1994. And I’ve never seen a more dangerous application targeting teenagers, specifically girls, than SnapChat. […]

  22. […] I’ve been engaged in various forms of social media since AOL chat rooms in 1994.  And I’ve never seen a more dangerous application targeting teenagers, specifically girls, than SnapChat. […]

  23. […] began using SnapChat since I first heard of it from a friend late in 2012. I thought it was great and I used it the all […]

  24. […] I’ve been engaged in various forms of social media since AOL chat rooms in 1994. And I’ve never seen a more dangerous application targeting teenagers, specifically girls, than SnapChat. […]

  25. […] I’ve never seen a more dangerous application targeting teenagers, specifically girls, than SnapChat. […]

  26. […] phone. (Not to mention a ton of servers and switches who pass that data across the web.)” Snapchat: Good for Teenagers? By the same guy as above ^ “I know there are some innocent uses out there. I’ve even heard […]

  27. […] questão de segundos. Ainda é possível que qualquer coisa que você poste afete-o. De acordo com Adam McLane, “Não há tal coisa como o anonimato online, apenas anonimato percebido. Toda vez que o seu […]

  28. Snp Avatar

    Actually, I do not like to use young, but it can not prohibit. Nice article Adam.

  29. mother Avatar
    mother

    very interesting reading as I am looking for advice on Snapchat. My 12 year old son is begging me to get the app as he says all his classmates have it and he is the 2nd eldest in class..some are still 11 and are using it even though its supposed to be over 13 with parental control. I dont allow him use of internet without my supervision and we are very protective when it comes to internet and phones etc. He feels left out at school and with his mates as they are using snapchat and he just wants to fit in. I told him we would research it and after reading up on it I feel this app is not suitable. My son goes to a local country school and I do wonder why I am the only parent of the 6th class aware of the dangers of this app. I have read all the data and findings about this app to my son and at first he said it was all a bit scary and he might give it a miss. But then he sees the lads using it and is left out in the group. Any advice.. Mother

  30. […] Anything we post online becomes public. Even the most cautious teen can be a victim of identity theft or cyberbullying. Online anonymity is false and it is only perceived anonymity. […]

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