Snapchat’s Safety Struggle

Snap likes to cast its Snapchat app as “an antidote to social media.” Unlike its rival social media apps, Snapchat was “designed to be safe” for kids, the company claims. But designing something to be safe and actually making it safe aren’t the same things.

How Snap has fallen short on this front became clear from an unredacted version of a complaint against the company filed today by the New Mexico Attorney General. Part of a lawsuit filed last month, the complaint mines a trove of internal company messages to show that Snap’s staffers knew that a staggering volume of child sexual abuse material was circulating on Snapchat. And they knew they weren’t moving aggressively enough to stop it.