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00:00:01
Snapchat : Addictive and Dangerous
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Andrew, a father of two and lifelong gamer, teams up with Brandon, a consumer psychologist and ex-pro video game coach, to cover video games, the way they are designed and how these design decisions impact the children that play them.
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Transcript
Intro
00:00:11
Andrew Wilmot
Good morning, good day, good evening, whenever you are, or welcome to the Dopamine Slot Machine, the podcast that discusses what you need to know about the video games that your children are playing. How are they designed to get your kids hooked?
00:00:23
Andrew Wilmot
How are they designed to make money from your children? And what can you do to make sure that your child's relationship with video games is a positive one? Except this week, of course, we're not actually talking about video games, we're talking about Snapchat.
00:00:36
Andrew Wilmot
And, uh, It is actually just me. It's going to be a little while before get used to doing these episodes without Brandon. Although I'm sure that you will feel, you will see Brandon's fingerprints or whatever the audio equivalent of fingerprints is all over this because he has done so much of the background ah research on this.
00:00:58
Andrew Wilmot
And so Snapchat. It is one of, if not the dominant messaging platforms for children and teenagers. ah It's been around a little while. used Snapchat as a teenager back in 2012, so relatively soon after was first founded.
00:01:14
Andrew Wilmot
So yeah, Snapchat was founded in 2011 by a load load of Stanford graduates and the basic idea was ah ah social media app where photos and messages would disappear after being viewed.
00:01:27
Andrew Wilmot
The idea social media in the moment as opposed to cultivating a brand or image or anyway so ephemeral messaging so unlike facebook or instagram where posts live on forever snapchat promised privacy and impermanence so and and i was a teen at the time that seemed really cool The other thing that's not so much talked about these days is compared to other messaging platforms at the time, it was just actually a relatively easy way to send photos to each other. The other messaging apps were fairly clunky.
00:02:02
Andrew Wilmot
But yeah, it meant that you could share images to each other without having the pressure of a permanent digital record. I don't think I need to go into detail about some of the ways that that was immediately taken up by my peers.
00:02:21
Andrew Wilmot
a photo app where nobody can save it. Teenagers, nobody really knows the risks of smartphones at that point. Use your imagination.
00:02:32
Andrew Wilmot
Anyway, so the growth has been absolutely explosive. It's got about 700, more than 700 million active users worldwide, is about 11% of the global population aged 13 and up.
00:02:46
Andrew Wilmot
I mean, taking a look at the latest stats from Ofcom, just going read it verbatim here. For instance, 27% of 10-year-olds visited Snapchat in a month, and this increased to 64% among 12-year-olds.
00:03:03
Andrew Wilmot
By the way, Snapchat says that the minimum age you have to be to use the platform is 13. Obviously, that is just going to be widely ignored. 13 to 14-year-old Snapchat users spend an average of two hours, 13 minutes a day on Snapchat, with visitors aged 10 to 12 on average spending one hour, 18 minutes.
00:03:27
Andrew Wilmot
So, okay, so we've got this... photo video sharing platform that is supremely popular amongst kids and the hook for it is that there's no sort of record or transcript. What could go wrong?
00:03:41
Andrew Wilmot
We will go into what goes wrong in terms of safeguarding and the very real danger and harm that Snapchats is causing kids. But first, I want to touch little bit on addictive design. one of the most innovative to use inverted commas there features that Snapchat introduced was something called the snap streak.
00:04:00
Andrew Wilmot
So you effectively get points that build up over time. you and a friend exchange snaps or photos of videos every day, you build up that streak.
00:04:10
Andrew Wilmot
And just that sort of streak mechanic has been widely adopted in loads of places now because they've seen the success that Snapchat has had with using this to cultivate compulsive behavior.
00:04:24
Andrew Wilmot
But if you miss a day, the streak resets to zero, with an hourglass emoji even appearing as a warning. There was a 2023 study titled Snapchat Streaks. How are these forms of gamified interactions associated with problematic smartphone use and fear of missing out among early adolescents, which found that snap streaks are strongly linked to problematic smartphone use and fear of missing out among early adolescents.
00:04:48
Andrew Wilmot
With teens reporting feeling pressured to maintain streaks, sometimes even giving friends that login information if they can't access their phones just to keep their streak alive. I've been at a number of school fairs recently, and one of the things that I've found really impressive, actually, is the number of...
00:05:05
Andrew Wilmot
children of all ages who are willing to come and engage on smartphone free childhood whether that be to challenge us on our views and come up and say actually smartphones are good because i can talk with my mates or in some cases coming up and asking for tips on reducing the smartphone use or even just sort of saying their concerns about smartphones but one of the things that came up a couple of times which asked so
00:05:34
Andrew Wilmot
how would you feel if you couldn't use your smartphone for a day? And something that came up a number of times was, I would lose my Snapchat streaks. And it's got such a vice grip on these kids as soon as they use it.
00:05:51
Andrew Wilmot
To go back to the 2023 study, the idea of them sharing login information I don't even like sharing my screen at work when I'm doing a presentation or showing something to someone. So to think about sharing my login information and the various information security risks that presents just because of this gamification, this addictive design, is horrifying from a security perspective.
00:06:20
Andrew Wilmot
not just that, there's the peer pressure element. So your SnapScore building up with people.
00:06:28
Andrew Wilmot
Snapchat knows. They've got... This might have started off as an experiment, but they know what this does to the their users, to the children that use it. There's some research from Mobikip and Addiction Centre that highlights that losing a streak can trigger withdrawal-like symptoms, irritability, sadness, and even anger.
00:06:47
Andrew Wilmot
with some teams sending blank snaps just to keep a streak alive. Now that's not even engaging in platform in a meaningful way. That is an almost Pavlovian reaction to just the fear of losing that streak, where the addictive design has taken a precedence over the the the supposed meaningful interaction that Snapchat offers.
00:07:13
Andrew Wilmot
that's not even to talk about the Snapchat AI. So I only recently discovered about Snap AI myself. I stopped using Snapchat when I was about 15, 16, I think.
00:07:28
Andrew Wilmot
So my time with Snapchat was very much during its early games. So they've got this built-in AI, similar to the ones that you might find now in WhatsApp. It's powered by the same sort of language models like GPT.
00:07:42
Andrew Wilmot
Anyway, so it's designed to function as like a conversational AI. It can answer questions, offer recommendations, help people. It's presented like ah what's called a bitmoji. So it's in the same style as their friends on Snapchat.
00:07:57
Andrew Wilmot
Now, I don't know about you guys, but putting aside every other risk and dangerous element that Snapchat is designed with.
00:08:08
Andrew Wilmot
I just don't feel comfortable with a platform that is primarily used by children presenting this AI as a friend. AI isn't going to be having its responses monitored.
00:08:25
Andrew Wilmot
It's very easy for AI to go a little bit haywire. haywire. i use AI very regularly in my working life.
00:08:36
Andrew Wilmot
gets into so many other topics here. You hear issues with over-reliance on AI to do homework so they're never actually learning things deeply.
00:08:47
Andrew Wilmot
There's issues with the treatment of, this sounds so ridiculous to say, but the treatment of AI partners. And that sounds ridiculous, but there was a really awful case the in the US, I think, where ah ah this mother is saying that her son killed himself because of an obsession with an AI chatbot, which was based on Daenerys Targaryen, the character from Game of Thrones, that he was targeted with hyper-sexualized content through the AI. Now, that's not the Snap AI. That's separate platform called Character AI. But what I'm trying to get here is
00:09:25
Andrew Wilmot
It's very possible. it It's not just possible. It is happening where children are having these inappropriate, in terms of emotional investment, relationships with AI characters, people? They're not people, it's AI, but this sort of anthropomorphised artificial intelligence.
00:09:48
Andrew Wilmot
So to then put that every free teenager teenager who's got Snapchat put that in their pocket. What sort of risks are we taking? And then there's bullying.
00:10:00
Andrew Wilmot
So Snapchat's disappearing messages here, but bit of a double-edged sword. So the claim they offer privacy, flip side, and I'm not a teacher, but we've spoken with some teachers, the difficulties that they've got when something might have been recorded and shared on Snapchat,
00:10:18
Andrew Wilmot
only for the evidence to, by design, disappear. And the the stats speak for themselves here. So in 2025, 69% of kids on Snapchat reported being cyberbullied.
00:10:33
Andrew Wilmot
Of that, by the way, only 23% of high school victims report the abuse to an adult. So if your child has Snapchat, then, you know, call that, just round it up for the sake of maths,
00:10:47
Andrew Wilmot
70% chance that they've been cyberbullied. And then of that, a further quarter chance of them having actually told you. So three quarters, three quarters of 70%. Ooh, that's about, what, 50%.
00:11:02
Andrew Wilmot
So if you've got a child, if they're on Snapchat, there's about a 50% chance that they've been cyberbullied and not told you about it. And there's some awful case studies for this.
00:11:14
Andrew Wilmot
So there was, I came across a story shared by the NSPC this girl, Megan, who was pressured to send a nude photo to a boy over Snapchat and found that within 24 hours, her image had been shared across her school via Snapchat. Now, Snapchat isn't unique in this.
00:11:35
Andrew Wilmot
We see this with WhatsApp. We see this with Facebook. Any sort of messaging platform between kids, there will be an element of this. But Snapchat is unique in the degree to which it is so image focused. So image first.
00:11:53
Andrew Wilmot
As I alluded to at the start, that was the real probably breakout use case amongst my peers. That's been the case since Snapchat's inception. Children sharing sexual content to each other on Snapchat is not a new problem.
00:12:10
Andrew Wilmot
It has been there since the first day Snapchat was made.
00:12:15
Andrew Wilmot
And with that,
00:12:18
Andrew Wilmot
this this is difficult enough talking about children sharing inappropriate content with each other and the potential consequences that can come of that when those images are perhaps then forwarded on.
00:12:31
Andrew Wilmot
It's a whole different kettle of fish when we talk about grooming and child sexual abuse. So apart from the disappearing messages,
00:12:43
Andrew Wilmot
apart from the private messages, you've got things like Snap Map, which is a sort of map map feature where you can see where all your Snapchat friends are. This is a real perfect storm for exploitation.
00:12:58
Andrew Wilmot
So in the UK, police figures show that Snapchat is now the most widely used platform for online grooming. And there's nothing that really brings it to the fore than an example. So I found an article on the BBC and I'll share this in the article description as well and I'm just going to read it back to you.
00:13:22
Andrew Wilmot
So Nikki, whose real name the BBC is not using in this obviously, was eight when she was messaged on a gaming app by a groomer who encouraged her to go on to Snapchat for conversation.
00:13:35
Andrew Wilmot
Now it doesn't actually mention what that gaming app was but It's almost certainly Roblox, right? Statistically, not to tie everything into how bad Roblox is, but this is a pattern that we've seen over and over again.
00:13:51
Andrew Wilmot
Roblox has unblockable group chat functionality. And even if they disable that private messaging function, people will tell you to move off of that onto another platform like Snapchat, which is very privacy focused.
00:14:07
Andrew Wilmot
So to continue quoting, I don't need to explain details, but anything that you can imagine happening, happened in those conversations. Videos, requests, pictures, requests of certain material from Nikki, etc.
00:14:21
Andrew Wilmot
Her mother, who the BBC is calling Sarah, explained.
00:14:24
Andrew Wilmot
Sarah says she then created a fake Snapchat profile pretending to be a daughter, and the man messaged at which point she contacted the police. So unfortunately, Although we track the number of offences of sexual communication with the child, which only became its own offence in 2017, we only record what platform it was on about third of the time. So out of 7,062 cases, only 1,824 they recorded platform, or the platform known.
00:14:56
Andrew Wilmot
they Of those, 48% were recorded on Snapchat.
00:15:03
Andrew Wilmot
Yeah. There's been a lot of talk about grooming gangs and grooming scandals and the girls in Rather Them, etc, etc, from various corners over the last couple of months with the with release of the inquiry.
00:15:21
Andrew Wilmot
My worry... is whilst we might talk about that as a specific geographical specified incident, we've got a lot of them in every bedroom now.
00:15:38
Andrew Wilmot
The vast majority of 13 year olds have smartphones. And forget teenagers here. Ofcom found that the proportion of three and four year olds, and keep in mind the previous discussion about child grooming and snap maps and AI, found that three and four year olds using Snapchat had risen to 17% in 2022.
00:16:03
Andrew Wilmot
I wasn't able to find stats for 2024, uh, but we can only assume that as with everything else, uh, device and digital trend that that's continued to go up. 17%. 17% of three and four year olds on an image sharing platform.
00:16:23
Andrew Wilmot
An image sharing platform that has addictive design built at its core, that has unregulated use of AI being touted as a feature and encourages its users to constantly track each other.
00:16:37
Andrew Wilmot
And so we've talked about the very easy to grasp dangers that Snapchat causes in terms addictive design and also the risk it poses for bullying and sexual exploitation.
00:16:49
Andrew Wilmot
But one thing that I personally find very hard to quantify is the more generalized risk to mental health. So outside of what we've talked about, one of Snapchat's real big innovations, again, using the word that they would like me to use for this, was the implementation of filters.
00:17:10
Andrew Wilmot
Now, in my mind, Snapchat filters are the sort of kind of cringe doggy ears and doggy tongue out with a heavily filtered photo. Filters have advanced quite far since that, where being able to give you a full face of makeup. Imagine your entire world being, or your entire social world being filtered through you You take a photo, you pick which filter you might take a dozen photos to make sure that you get the one that is most flattering to yourself.
00:17:44
Andrew Wilmot
At what point do you start to identify more with the result of that filtered photo than the person you see in the mirror? I'm not a mental health expert.
00:17:57
Andrew Wilmot
I am not qualified to start talking about the reasons behind the ongoing mental health crisis amongst children.
00:18:09
Andrew Wilmot
I'm not qualified to give you the reason behind the 65% increase in the number of children and young people being admitted to medical wards because of a mental health concern between 2012 and 2022.
00:18:25
Andrew Wilmot
And, you know, if we just narrow that down to eating disorders, that's gone from, that's been 500% increase over that period of time, the 10 years since Snapchat was released.
00:18:42
Andrew Wilmot
I'm not going to just point at Snapchat and say that is the reason for the dramatic rise in mental health problems amongst children. But it's going to be part of that confidence. It's going to be one of those things feeding into it.
00:18:55
Andrew Wilmot
The rise in the way it uses filters, the way it uses addictive design, the way it encourages children to build a habit where they are staring at their screens, cultivating their online persona, as opposed to getting engaged in the real world.
00:19:12
Andrew Wilmot
You know, ill'll I'll put myself out there. if If Snapchat want to come and sue the dopamine slot machine because of my statements here that ah they might be a contributing factor to the mental health crisis, then go ahead.
00:19:23
Andrew Wilmot
Go ahead. We'll have that conversation in court. That be brilliant. Please don't actually sue me. Snapchat talks a lot about their safeguards.
00:19:33
Andrew Wilmot
These don't work. These absolutely do not work. What? In-app warnings when minors add friends they don't know. Parental controls. All of that stuff is only as good as the person setting it up.
00:19:44
Andrew Wilmot
And the frank reality for most parents is the kids will be more savvy about these apps than they will ever be because other ones who are spending hours a day in them. These safeguards are nothing more than cigarette companies boasting about the quality of their filters.
00:20:03
Andrew Wilmot
They are not going to help you in your chat. And if you think that you have got Snapchat set up in a way that it is safe, then I'm very sorry to say, but you are either simply incorrect or deluding yourself.
00:20:22
Andrew Wilmot
If you think, oh, i i I have access to Snapchat so I can see, well, how often are you checking? Are you monitoring it? Are you looking at every single message that's ever been sent? Are you monitoring it in real time? So if somebody does start sending some inappropriate content or reaching out that way or trying to get them to move off Snapchat to another app that you might not have parental controls about, are you there to intervene before the harm occurs?
00:20:49
Andrew Wilmot
Do you know every which way that children are using to get around parental controls? Yes. I consider myself fairly clued in on this, but the more I learn about the the ways in which children evade parental controls, the more I think that we can never build a wall high enough around these spaces to keep them safe.
00:21:13
Andrew Wilmot
So just don't put them in the space in the first place. But what can you do? So realised in that last segment that I probably, that whole ignorant or deluded line, probably came across as as very judgmental.
00:21:25
Andrew Wilmot
and at times it can be difficult not to be. I'm not going to lie to you. But that said, we've made mistakes in our own way, and every parent does.
00:21:37
Andrew Wilmot
So what can you do? Let's say that you have given your child Snapchat. It's on their own device. You're listening to this perhaps with a mixture of offence and revulsion home.
00:21:50
Andrew Wilmot
this app that you thought perhaps was relatively innocuous, perhaps a bit of fence at the way that I've framed it.
00:21:56
Andrew Wilmot
Actual actionable advice. I've said in a couple of places that the most effective parental control that any parent can have is an open and honest and bi-directional dialogue between themselves and their team.
00:22:13
Andrew Wilmot
There's a model that's used in cybersecurity. It was also used a lot during COVID, the the Swiss cheese model, where every single layer of protection has vulnerabilities, and it's about layering enough of them up of high enough quality that most of the most harmful incidents are caught.
00:22:35
Andrew Wilmot
That open-honest conversation, open-honest dialogue, is that final layer of protection. And if you don't have that, and if... whether you have everything locked down or you're very laissez-faire, then... something will slip by you.
00:22:56
Andrew Wilmot
You cannot be supervising your child 100% of the time, particularly once they're at that age. Setting boundaries. So... A couple of really actionable boundaries I mean, this applies to mobile phones in general, but not in the bedroom, not at night, not in the bathroom, not whilst toilet.
00:23:18
Andrew Wilmot
So mentioned this to a couple of kids who came up to to stool a few days ago. It's how people actually do that. They take the phone to the toilet. And I'm like, yes, statistically, probably all of you have at some point, but you don't want to appear disgusting in front of your friends. But yeah, if you make Snapchat something that is used in more public spaces, then you start to mitigate a lot of these harms. I am very dismissive of the parental controls.
00:23:51
Andrew Wilmot
I think that they... give the illusion of safety. But that said, as a layer, if a very ineffectual layer, if they're there, use them, right? Familiarize yourself with Snapchat's family center and privacy settings.
00:24:10
Andrew Wilmot
Just be aware that it's not really much protection. It might stop a couple of things, but you have to combine it with everything else.
00:24:20
Andrew Wilmot
And then just being in tune with with your kid, right? So watching out for warning signs, sudden mood changes, secrecy, or withdrawing from things that they were previously interested in. All those can be warning signs.
00:24:35
Andrew Wilmot
They can also be signs that you might be living with a teenager, and I appreciate that, but just keeping an eye on them. So Something that I have been asked a couple of times is what age would I let my child use so Snapchat?
00:24:53
Andrew Wilmot
So I've described myself as quite gaming positive. We play games with our children. I am not anti-tech. But for me, Snapchat should be way up into the realms of...
00:25:05
Andrew Wilmot
something that only fully formed adults should be using, should be making the decision to use, are capable of understanding the ramifications of that use.
00:25:16
Andrew Wilmot
So 18, no Snapchat till you're 18. Well, realistically, in the same way that, in the same way that, you know, you're not allowed buy alcohol till you're 18, but by 18, I think it's fairly normal to have had a sip of beer at the very least.
00:25:32
Andrew Wilmot
perhaps introducing it in a staggered approach with lot controls coming up to that point. Because 18, potentially they might be off to university, they'd be moving out. But that said, it's completely inappropriate for kids in so many different ways. And I would not be comfortable letting somebody who perhaps... You what, if you're mature enough to hold down a part-time job...
00:26:00
Andrew Wilmot
then maybe you're mature enough to start thinking about Snapchat. So, you know, you're talking 15, 16, maybe 17, depending on the child. But until then, there is nothing to gain from Snapchat, and there's so much that you can lose by letting your child have it.
00:26:21
Andrew Wilmot
Oh, that was a bit of a heavy episode. That was blimey. I feel myself just sinking deeper and deeper into a depression talking about how awful that app is.
00:26:34
Andrew Wilmot
So in, in my day job, I work relatively closely with the police as one of the technology vendors and without going into detail, some of the the conversations and things I've heard about, uh,
00:26:47
Andrew Wilmot
The problems that they're seeing with Snapchat and child grooming is just so depressing to hear about. And I'm just glad that I'm hearing more and more parents becoming aware of the dangers that Snapchat presents, that it is not just another messaging platform.
00:27:05
Andrew Wilmot
Anyway, so don't forget that if you've got any questions for us or if your children have been impacted by the issues we've discussed today, please do get in touch with us on our website, thedopamineslotmachine.co.uk or find us on the Dopamine Slot Machine Discussion Corner Facebook group.
00:27:21
Andrew Wilmot
All links can be found in our artist profile and we'd love to hear from you. That's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining us. We'd love to have you here again with us our next episode where, no spoilers, but I've got a guest I'm very excited to talk with. I think you're going to enjoy listening to them too.
00:27:39
Andrew Wilmot
This has been the Dopamine Slot Machine. Thank you and see you soon.