The Snap Map lets you see where your friends are, find things to do together, and explore the world. While the Snap Map is personal to you, and provides an overview of your location and your friends, the content that is shown to you on Snap Map is not personalized. This page provides you with more details on the logic behind the content you see on Snap Map.
1. Moderating Content
We apply human and/or automoderation to decide what content is eligible to appear on Snap Map. Our automoderation tools are trained to detect and exclude and/or remove content in violation of our terms (including our Community Guidelines). Human moderators are trained to do the same, for example when content is reported on the Map or escalated for human review by our automoderation tools. We have also put in place technical controls to limit user content from more sensitive places such as schools, hospitals and adult venues appearing on the Map.
2. Understanding Map Content
To better understand what content we show to you we may categorize content submitted to Snap Map and apply tags. For example, if someone uploads a Snap of them eating a hamburger, we may tag it as such so it can show up with other food content or may be associated with a hamburger restaurant. Similar to our content moderation, both humans and/or computers assist with this process.
3. Ranking Content on Maps
We use algorithms to rank what content we show to you on Snap Map. One important factor in deciding what content we show to you is ‘recency.’ This means that when you view City Stories in London, you’ll be more likely to see Stories that were recently posted in London. In contrast, if you check out events or popular places on the Map, the content is shown in chronological order, meaning you will see the most recent content last.
In addition to Stories about events or popular places, we also show content that is specific to a certain place, like that hamburger restaurant, and we call these Place Stories. Ranking for these Stories is a little different, and the content that appears first depends on how many people have Favorited this content, followed by the content category (e.g. whether it shows food), and lastly the metadata so that we can prioritize showing you videos over images.
Lastly, we will highlight places to you that your friends have recently visited by showing you their Snaps that have been tagged with Places, along with the Bitmoji of your friend.