Explore if Snapchat is safe for kids through internal emails exposing concerns and dangers, including sextortion, on the platform. Parents must be informed.
Published Tuesday, June 23, 2026
TL;DR
Is Snapchat safe for kids? Based on the company's own internal documents, the answer is more complicated than most parents realize.
Emails shown in court say that kids were being sextorted on the platform about 10,000 times a month. Snap's employees agreed that this number was probably much lower than the real cases.
Executives were warned. Nothing changed. Children died. Here is what the internal documents show, what the lawsuits reveal, and what every parent needs to know before their child sends another snap.
Is Snapchat safe for kids? Most parents already know the answer. Here's what they don't know.
Most parents who have looked into Snapchat have already made their decision. The disappearing messages, the stranger discovery features, the reputation, enough families have said no that it has become one of the more commonly blocked apps in parental control settings.
If that is where you landed, you were right to be concerned. But banning Snapchat from one device does not end the story.
The design patterns that make Snapchat dangerous, disappearing messages, unmoderated discovery features that connect strangers to minors, an age verification system described internally as "effectively useless," exist on other platforms too. Predators do not stay where they are blocked. They go where the conversation moves.
And what Snap's own internal documents reveal is that the company understood exactly how its design was being exploited, watched it happen for years, and chose not to tell parents.
That is the part most families do not know. Not that Snapchat is dangerous -- many already suspected that. But that the executives responsible for protecting children on the platform had it in writing, called it "an incredibly concerning issue," and then decided that fixing it would "create disproportionate admin costs."
What the internal emails actually say
In October 2024, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed an unredacted lawsuit against Snap Inc. that pulled back the curtain on years of internal communications about child safety on the platform. The documents were sourced from Snap's own employees, not outside investigators.
The unredacted New Mexico lawsuit against Snap Inc. exposed internal communications in which employees flagged rampant sextortion on the platform, and were repeatedly ignored by leadership.
The unredacted New Mexico lawsuit against Snap Inc. exposed internal communications in which employees flagged rampant sextortion on the platform, and were repeatedly ignored by leadership.
Here is what they show
In November 2022, a trust and safety employee sent an internal email noting that Snapchat was receiving around 10,000 user reports of sextortion every single month. The email continued: "If this is correct, we have an incredibly concerning issue on our hands, in my humble opinion." Another employee replied that the 10,000 figure likely represented only "a small fraction of this abuse," since many victims were too embarrassed to report and because sextortion was "not easy to categorize" when trying to report it on the platform.
Ten thousand reports per month. Acknowledged by the company's own employees to be a fraction of actual cases. Snap chose not to warn parents.
The internal documents also reveal that as early as 2019, Snap employees knew that searching the word "underage" on Snapchat would surface accounts belonging to minors, making it a direct discovery tool for predators. In 2022, employees flagged that Snap's Quick Add feature was actively suggesting adult strangers to minor users, and that Snap Map allowed adults to find minors near schools. A "Sextortion handbook" circulating on the dark web showed predators exactly how to use Snap Maps to target students at nearby schools, and Snap was aware of it.
The same year, a consultant hired by Snap found that one-third of teen girls and 30 percent of teen boys had been exposed to unwanted contact on the platform. An internal Snap survey found that 51 percent of Gen Z respondents said they or a friend had experienced catfishing on Snapchat, and one quarter of those had been sextorted.
When employees tried to add safety mechanisms in response, internal documents show they faced "pushback" from management. According to a Slack chat cited in the lawsuit, Snap employees acknowledged that "by design, over 90 percent of account-level reports are ignored today," and that instead of investigating reports, the platform simply prompts the person reporting to block the other user.
In response to internal warnings about drug sales and child sexual abuse material on the platform, Snap's director of security engineering reportedly said: "That's fine, it's been broken for ten years, we can tolerate tonight."
When Snap's own database of child sexual abuse images was updated to catch more matches, employees were reportedly directed to roll back the change and delete the evidence of those matches.
These are not allegations made by outside parties. They are words from Snap's own people, in Snap's own communications, now part of the public court record. The lawsuit itself calls Snapchat "a breeding ground for predators to collect sexually explicit images of children and to find, groom and extort them."
What is sextortion (and what does it look like on Snapchat)?
Sextortion is not a slow-moving crime. That is the thing parents most consistently get wrong about it.
Bryce Tate was a 15-year-old honor student in West Virginia, active in his church and close to his parents. From the moment the first message arrived on his phone to his death by suicide was less than three hours.
Jordan DeMay was a 17-year-old from Michigan, a homecoming king, a popular athlete with college plans. He went to his room after dinner with his family. The timeline from first contact to his death by suicide was six hours. Neither family saw any warning signs. Neither family knew what sextortion was. Both families found out what happened only when investigators searched their sons' phones.
The anatomy of the scam is always the same. A stranger reaches out on social media, almost always posing as a teenage girl, and builds just enough trust to shift the conversation toward something sexual. Once the teen sends an explicit image, the friendly facade disappears immediately. The predator threatens to send the image to the victim's parents, friends, and school unless the teen pays money or sends more images.
The amounts asked for are usually small. Jordan DeMay was asked for $1,000 and Bryce Tate for $300. But for a scared teenager, the fear of being found out can feel very overwhelming.
According to the FBI, from October 2021 to March 2023 alone, more than 13,000 reports of financial sextortion of minors were filed with federal authorities. Those reports involved at least 12,600 victims, primarily boys, and led to at least 20 deaths by suicide. The FBI also reported a 20 percent increase in sextortion reports during a six-month period ending March 2023 compared to the same period the year prior, and cases have continued to climb since.
From October 2024 to March 2025, the FBI reported a 30 percent increase in sextortion-related tips submitted to its National Threat Operations Center. The number of victims went up from 34,000 to 54,000 between 2023 and 2024. In the last two years, over $65 million was sent from victims to those who harmed them.
A report from The Pointer in 2025 found that the U.S. has had 44 teen suicides due to sextortion since 2021. In one case, it took only 27 minutes from the first contact to the victim's death. Eighty-three percent of victims are young men, and most initial contact is made through Instagram or Snapchat.
Snapchat is not the only platform where this happens. But it is the platform whose internal documents show employees watching it happen and doing nothing.
The Snapchat dangers parents don't know about: disappearing messages aren't a safety feature
Snapchat has always marketed its disappearing content as a feature that gives users privacy and freedom. What the internal documents reveal is that Snap's own employees understood the flip side of that design.
Disappearing messages mean that predators can advertise, solicit, and communicate with minors without leaving a permanent record. Law enforcement cannot recover what Snap does not store. Victims cannot prove what was said. Parents cannot find evidence of what their child was threatened with.
In one internal communication cited in the New Mexico lawsuit, Snap's own communications director complained that while the company was "pushing back fiercely on the claim that illegal content is particularly bad on Snapchat," internal data showed that "drug dealing, both buying and selling, has increased significantly" on the platform. The disappearing content feature, designed as a selling point, had become the infrastructure for an open drug market targeting teenagers.
The National Crime Prevention Council described Snapchat as "a digital open-air drug market allowing drug dealers to market and sell fake pills to unsuspecting tweens and teens." Those pills were often counterfeit, laced with lethal doses of fentanyl. Alexander Neville was a 14-year-old in Orange County, California. He bought what he believed was a pill through a Snapchat dealer. He died of a fentanyl overdose. His mother, Amy Neville, has since traveled the country warning other parents.
Congress introduced the Cooper Davis and Devin Norring Act, named after two other teenagers who died after purchasing fentanyl-laced pills on Snapchat. Two children whose names are now attached to legislation because Snap did not protect them when it had every opportunity to do so.
CEO Evan Spiegel was aware.
As reported by TechPolicy's review of the full lawsuit, when the internal discussion about storing images related to child sexual abuse came up, which could have helped law enforcement, Spiegel personally advised against it: "We don't want to be responsible for storing that stuff."
What Snapchat has done about it
In June 2026, Snapchat announced that users between the ages of 13 and 15 would only be able to share posts with people they already follow back, and that their profiles would be limited to mutual connections. Parents would also gain deeper visibility into how much time their kids spend on the platform through Snap's Family Center.
These changes are real. They are also years late.
Snapchat announced new restrictions for users ages 13 to 15 in 2026. Employees had been raising internal alarms about predator access to minors since at least 2019.
Snapchat announced new restrictions for users ages 13 to 15 in 2026. Employees had been raising internal alarms about predator access to minors since at least 2019.
The internal documents that are now part of the public court record show that Snap employees were raising red flags about predator access to minors as early as 2019. The company's age verification system was described internally as "effectively useless in stopping underage users from signing up." The Quick Add feature was known to be connecting adult strangers with minors. Sextortion reports were described as falling "through the cracks" because "90 percent of account-level reports are ignored."
The June 2026 changes came after a Texas Attorney General lawsuit filed in February 2026, after a New Mexico Attorney General lawsuit filed in 2024, after thousands of individual lawsuits filed by families whose children were harmed, and after more than 44 teen suicides linked to sextortion. The timeline matters. So does the sequence.
As of today, Snap still allows users as young as 13. The new restrictions for 13 to 15-year-olds are improvements. They are not the same as the platform not being accessible to children at all.
What independent testing actually found
A 2026 independent audit from the Cybersafety Research Center and Heat Initiative put Snapchat's safety claims to the test, and the results were the worst of any major platform. Researchers tested 11 advertised child safety features on Snapchat and found that 8 of them, 73%, failed to actually protect kids.
Adults could message children with zero restrictions
The most alarming failure involved adult to child messaging. Snapchat's own marketing states that adults cannot find or message underage accounts.
Researchers created both an adult and a child test account, and from the adult account they were able to directly search for, find, and message the child account with zero restrictions. The child account received the friend request, accepted it, and could see the entire message history the adult had already sent, with no warning at any point in the process.
The "Find My Friends" opt-out didn't actually opt anyone out
A second failure involved Snapchat's "Find My Friends" opt-out, a setting buried deep in a settings menu with no prompt to use it.
Researchers configured a test account to opt out of friend suggestions, then set up a second account that had the first account's phone number saved as a contact. Within 24 hours, the opted-out account showed up as a top suggested friend anyway. The setting simply didn't work.
Crisis resource redirection was defeated by a misspelling
Even Snapchat's crisis resource redirection, meant to intercept searches for things like suicide or self-harm and point kids to help lines, was easily bypassed. Searching "suicide" triggered the safeguard, but searching "su1c1de" did not.
The takeaway for parents: Snapchat's safety settings exist on paper, and some genuinely work (blocking, location sharing restrictions), but the features most parents actually rely on to keep strangers away from their kids failed in direct testing.
What can parents actually do?
The conversation about sextortion is uncomfortable. Having it before something happens is far easier than having it after.
The conversation about sextortion is uncomfortable. Having it before something happens is far easier than having it after.
Understand what the app actually is before your child downloads it.
Snapchat is not just a camera. It is a messaging platform with a discovery feature documented to suggest adult strangers to minor users, an ephemeral messaging system that leaves no evidence trail for parents or law enforcement, and a user base that includes an unknown number of underage users who lied about their age to sign up. For any parent asking whether Snapchat is safe for kids, that context matters before the conversation about downloading it even starts.
Know that Snapchat parental controls are limited by design.
Snapchat's Family Center is the platform's primary tool for parents. It allows you to see who your child is talking to and how much time they are spending on the app. What it does not allow, by design, is seeing the content of those conversations. You can see that your child has been messaging an unknown contact for two hours. You cannot see a single word of what was said. That is not a parental control solution. That is a contact list with a timer. The disappearing messages feature that makes Snapchat attractive to teens makes it fundamentally difficult for parents to monitor, regardless of what settings are enabled.
Have the conversation about what sextortion is before it happens.
Most teenagers who are targeted by sextortion do not tell a parent. They feel shame. They feel fear. They believe the threat is real and that telling an adult will make it worse. If your child knows in advance what the scam looks like, that it targets boys as often as girls, that the predator's goal is panic, not exposure, and that telling you immediately is the only move that actually helps, they are more likely to come to you when it matters. The FBI recommends parents have this conversation directly and early.
Tell them the most important thing.
The predators in these schemes almost never follow through on their threats. Their leverage disappears the moment the victim stops responding and tells an adult. Every expert who works with sextortion victims says the same thing: the correct response is to stop contact immediately, tell a trusted adult, and report to the platform and to law enforcement. Paying does not make it stop. It signals that the victim is someone who will pay.
Know the warning signs.
Sextortion moves fast. A child who is being targeted may become suddenly withdrawn, anxious about their phone, or distressed after an evening on social media. If your teenager's behavior changes noticeably and they seem unwilling to explain why, take it seriously and ask directly. Use the word sextortion. Most teenagers have heard of it. Naming it removes some of its power. In one documented FBI case, an agent described receiving a tip about a minor who was contacted at 11 p.m. by 4 a.m., the child had already died.
Sextortion often happens late at night, alone, when a teenager is least likely to ask for help. Sudden changes in behavior after phone use are one of the clearest warning signs.
Sextortion often happens late at night, alone, when a teenager is least likely to ask for help. Sudden changes in behavior after phone use are one of the clearest warning signs.
How to report sextortion on Snapchat, and beyond.
If your child is being sextorted, do not pay. Screenshot everything before blocking. To report sextortion on Snapchat directly, go to the conversation, tap the profile, and use the Report function, select "It's suspicious or spam," and then "Soliciting or sending nude images." Beyond the platform, file a report with your local FBI field office or call 1-800-CALL-FBI. Submit a report to NCMEC's CyberTipline. Speed matters; the faster law enforcement is notified, the better the chance of identifying and stopping the perpetrator.
The question Snapchat's internal emails never answered
A Bloomberg Businessweek investigation into the sextortion epidemic found that by early 2023, FBI agents in Michigan were tracking a single sextortion ring operating out of an apartment complex in Lagos, Nigeria. The investigators found search histories including "Instagram blackmail death," "Michigan suicide," and "how can the FBI track my IP from another country." The Ogoshi brothers, two young men who ran the scheme, were eventually arrested by Nigerian authorities. Their victims included Jordan DeMay.
The perpetrators were eventually found. The platform that connected them to their victims was not held accountable before the deaths occurred.
In one of the internal communications now part of the public record, a Snap trust and safety employee wrote that they were "overrun by this sextortion right now" after the team had "twiddled our thumbs and wrung our hands all year." That was 2022. Children were being sextorted on Snapchat in 2019. Children are being sextorted on Snapchat today.
The question the internal documents raise, and that no Snap executive has answered in plain language, is simple: if your own employees knew, if they put it in writing, if they told management, and if the response was to prioritize engagement over safety, at what point does a corporation become responsible for what it allowed to happen to children on its platform?
Juries in New Mexico and California have begun answering that question. The answers are not going in Snapchat's favor.
One more layer of protection
Snapchat's Family Center lets parents see who their child is talking to. It does not let parents see what is being said. That gap, between knowing a conversation exists and knowing what is in it, is where the harm happens.
Aqua One works at the operating system level. Because it sits beneath the apps rather than inside them, its monitoring does not depend on what Snapchat chooses to share with parents. If explicit content arrives on your child's device through Snapchat or any other app, Nudity Prevention detects it and sends you a real-time alert. You are not waiting for your child to tell you. You are not hoping Snap's Family Center catches something. You know.
Snapchat's Family Center shows parents who their child is talking to. Aqua One shows parents what is actually being said, in real time, regardless of which app the conversation is happening in.
Snapchat's Family Center shows parents who their child is talking to. Aqua One shows parents what is actually being said, in real time, regardless of which app the conversation is happening in.
That visibility does not replace the conversation. It does not replace trust. But it means the disappearing messages feature, the one Snap built, the one that made it harder for law enforcement to investigate and easier for predators to operate, does not also make it impossible for you to protect your own child.
To report sextortion involving a minor, contact your nearest FBI field office, call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324), or submit a report to NCMEC's CyberTipline. If your child is in immediate distress, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
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Jordan Arnold
Kansas-born, digital native on a mission to help parents decode the online world their kids actually live in. When I’m not swimming laps or obsessing over the perfect Eastern European train route, I’m dodging judgmental stares from my bald, bossy cat, who’s absolutely convinced he should be in charge (and he might not be wrong).
Type 2 Helper / INTJ Architect
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