The free Snapchat app lets you chat with friends and quickly send photos and videos to your followers. Because Snapchat is popular among young people, the app is launching two new features to protect teenagers from contact with people they don’t know.
By Megan van der Wagt
Snapchat is popular among young people because you can quickly send photos and videos to your followers and you can chat with your friends. You can edit those photos with fun filters or stickers and add text to them. What is striking about Snapchat is that the images disappear after a few seconds as soon as the other person views them. Snapchat itself wants to help its users communicate with people who really matter. The content they view should be informative, fun and age-appropriate. Snapchat previously introduced the Content Controls feature that allows parents to restrict access to their children. Now Snapchat is introducing new safety measures for young people between the ages of 13 and 17.
Snapchat new features
Snapchat is mainly used to snap and chat with family or friends. There are also options to add lesser-known people to the app. This can create new friendships, but this can also have a downside. Snapchat is therefore introducing a new ‘strike system’ and new detection technologies. Snapchat is launching two new features to protect teens from contact with people they don’t know. They want to provide an age-appropriate viewing experience on the content platform and also more effectively remove accounts that want to market age-inappropriate content.
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In-app alert and new strike system
When a teen adds someone to the platform, Snapchat wants to make sure it is someone the user actually knows. Currently, 13- to 17-year-olds must already have several mutual friends to appear in another user’s search results, or as a friend suggestion. Snapchatters also cannot communicate with each other unless they both accept a friend request or have each other in their contact list. Now Snapchat is raising the bar by increasing the number of friends that must be in common. They do this based on the total number of friends of the Snapchatter.
As soon as a teen sends a friend request to someone not in their contact list, he or she will see a pop-up warning. This gives teenagers a little more time to think about the friend request.
Account banned
Snapchat prohibits illegal and harmful content such as sexual exploitation, pornography, violence, self-harm, misinformation and more. With the new strike system, Snapchat immediately removes age-inappropriate content that promotes an account. Content that is proactively detected or reported is immediately removed. If an account repeatedly circumvents the rules, it will be banned.