Since the beginning, empowering self-expression has been one of our most important goals.
We want to create amazing new ways to communicate, while cultivating a vibrant community where being yourself is both fun and safe. This means creating simple creative tools and simple rules for what’s okay and what’s not. This also means taking swift action against offenders, whether that’s removing a Story and sending a warning, or deleting an account permanently.
The vast majority of Snapchatters use the app to communicate with friends and family. As with any community, cultivating a safe environment requires smart, continuous work. Here are some of the ways we’re doing it!
Our Approach
When you sign up for Snapchat, you agree to our Terms of Service, which prohibits things like bullying and publicly distributing explicit content. We’ve created simple ways for Snapchatters to report any inappropriate Snaps or other content that they come across, and built dedicated Safety and Support teams to help enforce the rules and create a space where users and brands feel safe.
We’re investing in advanced, automated methods to take action against Snapchatters who violate our Terms and Community Guidelines. For example, our Abuse Engineering team creates new ways to monitor abuse and spam incidences on Snapchat. Additionally, we’re investing in engineering resources to support computer vision and other technology that can assist in these efforts.
We’ve also partnered with best-in-class safety experts like Connect Safely and the UK Safer Internet Centre. They helped us build our Safety Center and cultivate a better, safer community for us, our loved ones, and the world.
Safe Advertising
We offer several fun and effective ways for advertisers to reach Snapchatters!
In most of our ad products, curation plays a big role in creating a safe space for advertising. If you place ads in Publisher Stories, for example, your ads will appear in the context of Snaps curated by approved editors or by Team Snapchat.
We’ll also be moderating certain Snaps and Stories from popular Snapchatters in an effort to make sure that Snap ads and Promoted Stories don’t show up next to something that could be harmful to your brand. If a Snap or Story is flagged as unsafe for advertisers, then your ads will not show up in that Story, and that Story shouldn’t share the same screen as your Promoted Story on Discover.
If you buy a Sponsored Lens, Snapchatters themselves choose to place that branded Lens on their Snaps — almost like they’re wearing branded merchandise in person and showing it off to their friends, colleagues, and family.
And Single Image or Video ads are full screen videos that provide advertisers complete exclusivity on the phone screen, rather than sitting above or alongside other content.
In addition to moderation tools explained above, if a Snap created by the community violates our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, Snapchatters can report in-app or visit our Support Page and report a safety concern directly to us.