Overview
- Snap announced Wednesday that users ages 13–15 will get a dedicated profile where Stories and Spotlight videos are visible only to mutually accepted friends and will no longer be distributed to non-friend audiences.
- The company set different defaults by age so 16–17-year-olds can opt into limited public sharing with extra safeguards while adults 18 and older keep full public posting tools.
- Snap says it will rely on self-declared ages plus its age-inference signals to reassign accounts it judges under 16 to the friends-only experience, a step that raises questions about how accurately the system will work in practice.
- The change comes with Snap’s existing protections such as pre-moderation of public content, limits on who can message teens, warnings when teens accept strangers, and the Family Center parental tools.
- Advocacy groups have published a survey reporting high rates of unwanted contact, bullying, and sexually suggestive messages among teen users and legal pressure earlier this year, including a January settlement, has pushed Snap to make these product-level safety changes.