Pennsylvania attorney general sues Snapchat over addictive features
“Both of these actions reflect my priority as attorney general to protect our young people from tech giants who are choosing growth at all costs over the mental wellness of its users,” Sunday said.
Pennsylvania Attorney General David Sunday is suing Snapchat’s parent company for allegedly failing to protect children from addiction.
This comes after he announced a lawsuit against TikTok over the same issue earlier this month.
“Both of these actions reflect my priority as attorney general to protect our young people from tech giants who are choosing growth at all costs over the mental wellness of its users,” Sunday said Tuesday at a news conference in Philadelphia.
The suit alleges that Snap Inc., owner-operator of Snapchat, does not properly warn users of the addictiveness of its features and does not protect children properly from compulsive use.
“The allegations against Snap fundamentally misrepresent our platform and our approach to teen safety,” a Snap spokesperson said in a statement. “We share the Attorney General’s commitment to protecting young people online and are disappointed they have chosen litigation rather than working with us toward that shared goal.”
The complaint, which Sunday’s office filed this week in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, asks the company to take steps to protect children from becoming addicted. It cites the SnapStreak feature and the ephemeral nature of the content as examples of ways the app hooks teens specifically.
“To a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old, social acceptance is everything,” Sunday said. “The streak feature puts a tangible value on friendships and influences a child’s feelings of self-worth.”
The app sends an implicit message that the more a child is on the app, the more friends they will have and the more socially accepted they will be, Sunday said.
“That exploits the fear-of-missing-out culture to the absolute extreme,” he said.
It also alleges that Snapchat improperly promotes how frequently adult-themed material — including sexual content and nudity, suicidal ideation, and drug use — appears on the platform to achieve an age-13-plus app rating in app stores.
Through this litigation, Sunday said, he hopes to see Snapchat required to provide a more honest depiction of its content to app stores so it can be marked with a more mature rating, and to change its algorithm to be less addictive.
Montgomery County similarly sued some of the nation’s largest social media companies, including Snapchat’s and TikTok’s parent companies, in a federal court in Northern California earlier this month.
