Lenses help users learn about the world, have fun and express themselves. We believe that Lenses are most relevant and valuable when they are personalized to your interests, and not someone else’s. That is why we use algorithms to personalize and rank the Lenses on Snapchat.
For example, if you use a lot of Lenses that contain a particular theme, such as Sports, the algorithm will learn this and prioritize showing Lenses with Sports themes. However, we won’t just show you sports themed Lenses. We consider other factors as well, and we think a variety of Lenses is important to enhancing how you express yourself on Snapchat.
This page describes the steps we take to personalize and rank Lenses on Snapchat.
1. Moderating Lenses
Our Community Guidelines outline specific rules for content that is prohibited with the use of AR and Lenses. We want Snapchat to be a safe and positive experience for everyone so we prohibit Lenses that, for example, contain any sexually explicit content, violence or dangerous behavior, facilitates illegal activity, or promotes false information.
If you Report a Lens, we will flag those Lenses for our moderation team to review using our community guidelines. We do our best to determine whether Lenses are of sufficient quality to surface to the Snapchat community by automatic content moderation that is set to detect harm, as well as human review by our trained team members.
2. Understanding Lens Content & User Preferences
To understand Lens content and user preferences we have to do a couple of things. First, we categorize Lenses submitted to Snapchat with tags—for example “sports,” “makeup,” or “dogs.” Both humans and computers help with this process. Once we’ve labeled a Lens, we move to the next step, which is understanding if you would actually like the Lenses you will see.
There are a number of ways we try to figure out what Lenses you would enjoy. For example, if you send a Snap with a Lens to your Friends or post to your story or save, or play with it, or favorite it, we will use those as indicators that you enjoy those kinds of Lenses/AR experiences. Other indicators we use to see what you like are how long you might have played with a Lens and whether you created a Snap with it.
3. Age Appropriate Lenses
We take into consideration the user’s age when showing Lenses to our community. This way we can identify Lenses that are appropriate for you and to the best of our ability in compliance with local laws.
4. Ranking Lenses
Once we’ve labeled a Lens and figured out which Lens you would likely enjoy, we can make sure you see those Lenses in the right order: we call this "ranking."
We organize or rank Lenses based on a combination of your preferences and our understanding of the Lens content. This is done by predicting the probabilities of various actions you might take when seeing a given Lens, such as playing, saving, sending or posting with that Lens.
To make predictions about your actions, we use a variety of indicators, such as:
- Your country so that we can show you Lenses that are tailored to where you live.
- Lenses we think you like because you have been viewing similar Lenses, tapped "favorite", shared or engaged with.
- Lenses we think you enjoy by looking at the Lens category (e.g. this Lens is a “color changing” Lens) and tags applied during Lens submission.
- Lenses we think you are not interested in because you have chosen to remove or report them.
- Information about your device, such as device type and connection status and so that we can show you Lenses suited for your device.
- Information about your activity on Snapchat, including your time spent, your engagement with other features like Snaps and Stories, and when you’re last active on Snapchat. These are helpful indicators as we may want to show you a Lens that you missed when you were not active, and we believe users may have different Lens preferences depending on user behavior on Snapchat.
- How other users have engaged with a Lens (if they have sent, saved or favorited etc.) to help us understand if it’s a Lens you would be interested in as well.
Other factors we take into consideration that have less of an impact on ranking include:
- Your age and gender so that we can show you Lenses that are appropriate to your demographic
- The number of friends you have on Snapchat as we think this may impact your Lens preferences. For example, if you have many friends we think you may be interested in communicating with your friends using self expression Lenses.
- Lenses by Lens creators we think you’ll like because the creator is typically liked by others who share a similar demographic as you.
- Suggesting more complex Lenses to you if we think you’re using Snapchat on a device with higher performance.
The predictions are then used to assign a score to each Lens. The Lenses are then ranked according to these scores, with further adjustments and limits are put in place so a diverse range of Lenses are shown.
By using this Lens ranking, we hope that the algorithm succeeds in showing you the Lenses that you like the most. If that’s not the case, you can help the algorithm by engaging with Lenses that you enjoy for a longer time or by favoriting Lenses that you like.
We believe it’s very important that you see different types of Lenses and don’t get caught up in an echo chamber of the same Lenses. To prevent this we may show you a variety of other lenses, such as our AI Lenses or other hidden gems we think you may enjoy.
Personalization Controls
If you live in Europe Economic Area, the UK or in Switzerland you have the option to disable personalized Lenses. If you choose to disable personalized Lenses, we will no longer recommend Lenses based on your profile. You will still see Lenses, based on basic data only such as your country and age, and Lenses will be more random and less relevant to your interests. Note, you may experience some delay before the Lens recommendation changes. You can opt out by going to Personalization Controls in Settings.