Snapchat has hit back against the push to raise the age for allowing teenagers on social media to 16 and said it should be left to companies such as Apple or Google to enforce, if the law changes.
The federal government is currently assessing age assurance technology amid calls from the opposition to raise the age teenagers can access social media from 13 to 16.
As debate continues over the impact of social media on younger people, a majority of Snapchat’s 8m users in Australia are aged between 13 and 24. The company is positioning itself as the “anti-social media company”, focused on messaging between people who already know each other, rather than a platform dictated by algorithms pushing content to people.
“It’s not somewhere that you go to meet new people or to engage with strangers or post content that’s going to be seen by a huge audience,” the company’s global head of platform safety, Jacqueline Beauchere, told Guardian Australia.
Beauchere is in Sydney this week, meeting with stakeholders including the Australian eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant. Beauchere said decisions on when teenagers should access social media are best left to families.
“The age might be 13, the age might be 16, but not every 13-year-old is the same, and not every 14, 15, 16-year-old is the same,” she said. “They have a certain degree of a maturity level that’s associated with where they are in life.”
Beauchere said the emotional intelligence of the teenager, and their sense of agency and resilience, were important factors to consider. When asked if that meant more pressure on parents to allow their children to stay on social media, if it remained a family decision, Beauchere said any kind of ban would lead to pushback.
“Are you taking away something that they’ve been enjoying and benefiting from for, in some cases, several years now?”
But Snapchat is often cited as a common platform used for bullying outside the classroom, and by criminals engaged in sextortion by seeking out nudes from users and threatening to leak them unless the victim pays up.
Emma Mason, the mother of 15-year-old Bathurst girl Tilly Rosewarne, who killed herself in 2022 after a fake nude of her was shared by other students on Snapchat, has called for parliament to ban under 16s from social media. She told the social media inquiry it should be similar to cigarette bans for under 18s – enforced by police and the courts.
Paul Raffile, a security intelligence expert, recently posted on LinkedIn that nearly all of the 2,000 victims of financial sextortion he had spoken to were communicated with by the criminals on either Instagram or Snapchat.
Beauchere said the company was seeking to provide as many tools as possible for users to block, report and prevent abuse on its platform.
“We want them to report to us and tell us about it so that we can do something about it. Bullying is something that no one should have to experience, either online or in real life. This is not why Snapchat was created.”
Beauchere wants to make Snapchat a hostile environment for illegal activity. For sextortion, in addition to relying on user reports, the company is looking for signals in behaviour of accounts that show it is engaged in that activity. The company is not reading messages, but preventing friend requests from people from higher risk locations, as well as disclosing to users when they are friended by an account that has been blocked or reported by others.
The company also does not allow underage teenagers to friend someone not on their contact list or a friend of a friend.
Should the government proceed with lifting the age to 16 and attempt to enforce it via age assurance or verification technology, the company’s president for the Asia Pacific region, Ajit Mohan, told Guardian Australia it was something that would work best on the device level.
“It’s a worthwhile conversation to have whether the age verification is something that the operating system owners and the device makers have greater control on that than any one platform like us that sits on top of the operating system,” he said. “But we genuinely think that it’s an industry-wide problem, and it’s for the industry to find an answer to it.”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
