Snapchat’s Disappearing Messages Make It Easier for Predators to Target Children, State Lawsuit Alleges

Snapchat is the app of choice for criminals who engage in sextortion or spread child sexual abuse material (CSAM), New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez claims in a new lawsuit filed against the app’s owner, Snap.

The lawsuit accuses Snap of violating New Mexico’s unfair practices and public nuisance law, relying on design elements like “disappearing” messages and an alleged lack of oversight of predators. “Snap misled users into believing that photos and videos uploaded to its platform would disappear,” Torrez said in a statement. “But predators can permanently capture this content and have created a virtual yearbook of child sexual images that are traded, sold, and stored indefinitely.”

Torrez’s office conducted an undercover investigation similar to an earlier one against Meta, which it similarly sued for creating a “predator marketplace.” During the investigation, Torrez’s office created a fake Snapchat account that appeared to belong to a 14-year-old named Heather. That account sent messages to other Snapchat profiles with names like “child.rape” and “pedo_lover10,” according to the attorney general’s office, which said several accounts tried to trick the impersonator into sharing CSAM.

Snap’s claims that its app is “more private” and “less persistent” than other social media apps are misleading, the AG says. While the app’s disappearing messages feature can lead children and teens to believe their photos are fleeting, the AG says they are easily and frequently captured by predators. Torrez’s office said it found more than 10,000 Snap-related and CSAM-related records on the dark web in 2023, adding that “Snapchat was by far the largest source of images and videos among the dark web sites examined.”

Torrez is repeating the strategy that has so far brought success in his lawsuit against Meta, by attacking Snapchat’s product design and thus (theoretically) avoiding the more thorny speech issues. Torrez says that Snapchat’s design features, including disappearing messages and the “Quick Add” button that lets predators message minors, make it “a primary platform used by predators to engage in sextortion.” In the lawsuit against Meta, the judge found that the complaint could not be dismissed under Section 230, a legal liability shield that protects tech platforms from being held liable for their users’ speech.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also recently issued a legal ruling on lawsuits based on misleading product claims, allowing a lawsuit to proceed against a Snapchat-based anonymous messaging app called Yolo, alleging that the app falsely promised to expose the accounts of harassing users.

In the lawsuit against Snap, Torrez asks the court to order the company to stop its allegedly illegal conduct, pay penalties and return any ill-gotten gains. Snap did not immediately respond to a request for comment.