Snapchat has adjusted its ‘Solar System’ feature, turning it off by default, in response to recent criticism and concerns over its potential negative impact on teens’ mental health and relationships. The Solar System feature serves as a friend-ranking tool, driving teen anxiety by making them worry about their social status. One teen explains, “It’s everyone’s biggest fear put onto an app.”
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Snapchat’s friend ranking feature, part of its paid subscription service, is exacerbating feelings of insecurity and anxiety among teenagers by quantifying their social status within their friend group. The feature is just another example of how Silicon Valley titans place tremendous pressure on today’s teens to be part of the “in crowd,” leading one teen to explain, “It’s everyone’s biggest fear put onto an app.”
Newly unsealed court documents from an ongoing class action lawsuit against Meta show that in 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally directed executives to “figure out” how to track encrypted usage on competing apps like Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon.
Snap, the maker of the social media platform Snapchat, says it will lay off 10 percent of its global workforce, around 500 employees, to “promote in-person collaboration.”
Executives from TikTok, Meta, X (Twitter), Snap, and Discord will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the exploitation of children online.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to testify before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday to defend Facebook and Instagram’s impact on young users amid ongoing scrutiny of the tech giant’s social media platforms. Executives of Snapchat, TikTok, X/Twitter, and Discord will also testify.
Online “sextortion” is the fastest-growing crime targeting kids in the West, and social media companies are failing to do more to prevent it, according to a recent study.
A recent study claims that almost half of all British teenagers view themselves as addicted to social media, reigniting debates on the impact of online platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter on younger users.
A recent study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has revealed that social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok X/Twitter, and YouTube collectively earned nearly $11 billion in advertising revenue from U.S. users under 18 in 2022. The study found that the social media Masters of the Universe earned $2.1 billion by showing ads to children under 12.
The House investigated a second gay sex scandal as Washington, DC, reels from the initial graphic pornographic video filmed by a Senate aide.
A Florida substitute teacher was arrested Thursday morning after two of his female students accused him of sex crimes.
The CEOs of Meta, X/Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and Discord are set to testify January 31 before the U.S. Senate “about their failure to protect children” on social media.
A 24-year-old Missouri teacher is facing child sex abuse charges after allegedly trading x-rated images and videos with a 16-year-old student in an attempt to lure him for sex while her husband was away.
A New York middle school principal was charged with attempted rape after using Snapchat to meet up with a 16-year-old at a remote location.
Social media giants TikTok and Snapchat heard a plea for help Friday from French President Emmanuel Macron as he looks for ways to tamp down coverage of the violent riots engulfing the country.
Arkansas has joined Utah and Texas in passing a bill requiring age verification for children using social media in this case the Social Media Safety Act. However, the law has attracted criticism from some conservative policy analysts over its explicit carve out for the biggest social media platform for teenagers: Google-owned YouTube.
A teacher’s assistant lost her job after being accused of having sex with a 15-year-old student in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.
Caryn Marjorie, a 23-year-old Snapchat influencer, has created a voice-based, AI-powered chatbot of herself, which can be the “virtual girlfriend” of subscribers who pay $1 per minute to chat with it. Marjorie says her AI chatbot, CarynAI, could earn $5 million per month.
A former Oklahoma high school teacher has been arrested for allegedly exchanging “lewd and indecent messages” with multiple students.
A former school cafeteria worker who allegedly sexually assaulted a teenager in New Fairfield, Connecticut, has pleaded not guilty.
China-owned TikTok is trouncing its competitors in in-app purchases (IAPs), generating more revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022 than its top four competitors combined.
Online counseling service BetterHelp has been accused of selling user data to Facebook and Snapchat by the FTC. The online counseling service has agreed to pay a fine to settle the charges after the FTC alleged the company sold data about its users to Mark Zuckerberg and the Masters of the Universe after telling them it wouldn’t.
Snap, the parent company of the popular Snapchat social media app, recently reported disappointing fourth-quarter earnings due to ongoing issues with digital ads. The company also forecasted a drop in revenue of up to 10 percent for the upcoming quarter.
Seattle Public Schools is suing China-owned TikTok, Facebook (now known as Meta), Google’s YouTube, and Snapchat, accusing the social media giants of creating a “mental health crisis among America’s Youth.”
Social media giant Snap reportedly made an “error” that gave leading Democratic campaigns and party committees access to a huge repository of Republican voter data, allowing them to tailor their midterm ads.
Snap, the company behind social media platform Snapchat, is laying off approximately 20 percent of its more than 6,400 employees, according to sources.
Snapchat’s parent company Snap is reportedly in the early stages of planning layoffs, according to two sources.
Snap, the parent company of social media platform Snapchat, suffered a 36 percent drop in share price in intraday trading on Friday following the release of the company’s poor second-quarter results and the announcement of plans to slow hiring. The Silicon Valley company has lost almost two-thirds of its market value in 2022.
China-owned TikTok is facing claims that its algorithm steers violent videos towards black users rather than white users in a lawsuit blaming the platform for the death of a 14-year-old girl named Englyn Roberts.
Social media giant Snapchat suffered a huge 43 percent drop in its stock price on Tuesday after the company’s CEO warned of a continually deteriorating online digital advertising environment.
A Virginia teacher was charged in connection to the alleged possession of child porn after an investigation was launched recently, according to Fairfax County law enforcement.
In a recent interview, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel criticized Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse as “ambiguous and hypothetical.” According to Spiegel, “people really enjoy spending time together in reality.”
Chinese-owned social media app TikTok is set to triple its ad revenue in 2022 to more than $11 billion, totaling more ad sales than Twitter and Snapchat combined.
Facebook and Snapchat are both being sued over the suicide of a teenager in Wisconsin by his mother and an advocacy group holding the tech giants responsible for social media addiction.
TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance made fake accounts using content it scraped from Instagram and Snapchat, according to former employees, who described the project as one of several “growth hacks” implemented by the company.
A recent study suggests that the negative impact of social media platforms varies for girls and boys based on their age. Girls are most negatively impacted between the ages of 11 and 13, while boys are most negatively impacted between 14 and 15 years old.
Snapchat, the social media platform particularly popular with teens, has claimed that it is working to make it tougher for drug dealers to connect with children on its platform. The parent of one teen who overdosed on fentanyl-laced pills he bought from a dealer on Snapchat said in response: “What I find with Snap Inc. is that they publicize one Band-Aid after another, but at the end of the day, you can still go online and get drugs in seconds.”
The Facebook-owned social media platform Instagram is reportedly offering creators large sums of money to post videos to its TikTok clone, Reels.
A teacher in the Bronx has been arrested and charged for allegedly sending explicit pictures to multiple female students and forcibly touching one of the girls.
