Today, we’re releasing our transparency report for the first half of 2021, which covers the period of January 1 - June 30 of this year. As with recent reports, this installment shares data about violations of our Community Guidelines globally during the period; the number of content reports we received and enforced against across specific categories of violations; how we responded to requests from law enforcement and governments; our enforcements broken down by country; the Violative View Rate of Snapchat content; and incidences of false information on the platform. 

We’re adding several updates to our reporting this period, including noting our median turnaround time in minutes from hours to provide more detail about our operational practices and efficacy.

Every day, on average more than five billion Snaps are created using our Snapchat camera. From January 1 - June 30, 2021, we enforced against 6,629,165 pieces of content globally that violated our Guidelines. During this period, our Violative View Rate (VVR) was 0.10 percent, which means that out of every 10,000 views of content on Snap, 10 contained content that violated our Guidelines. Additionally, we significantly improved our time responding to reports of violations, in particular for sexually explicit content, harassment and bullying, illegal and counterfeit drugs, and other regulated goods. 

Our Work To Combat Child Sexual Abuse Material 

The safety of our community is a top priority. As a platform built for communicating with real friends, we intentionally designed Snapchat to make it harder for strangers to find young people. For example, Snapchatters cannot see each others’ friend lists, and by default, cannot receive a message from someone who isn’t already a friend.

We have zero tolerance for abuse directed at any member of our community, especially minors, which is illegal, unacceptable and prohibited by our Community Guidelines. We work diligently to combat these violations by evolving our capabilities to prevent, detect and eradicate abuse on our platform including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and other types of child sexually exploitative content.

Our Trust and Safety teams use proactive detection tools, such as PhotoDNA and Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) Match technology to identify known illegal images and videos of CSAM and report them to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC then, in turn, coordinates with domestic or international law enforcement. 

In the first half of 2021, 5.43 percent of the total number of accounts we enforced against globally contained CSAM. Of this, we proactively detected and actioned 70 percent of CSAM violations. This increased proactive detection capability combined with a rise in CSAM-spreading coordinated spam attacks resulted in a notable increase in this category for this reporting period. 

We have continued to expand our partnerships with safety experts as well as our in-app features to help educate Snapchatters about the risks of contact with strangers and how to use in-app reporting to alert our Trust and Safety teams to any type of concern or abuse. Additionally, we have continued to add partners to our trusted flagger program, which provides vetted safety experts with a confidential channel to report emergency escalations, such as an imminent threat to life or a case involving CSAM. We work closely with these partners to provide safety education, wellness resources, and other reporting guidance so they can help support the Snapchat community. 

Our Approach to the Spread of False Information

The period of time this transparency report covers further underscores how critical it is to ensure that the public has access to accurate and credible information. We regularly assess and invest in new means of protecting our community of Snapchatters from the spread of false information related to democratic processes, public health, and COVID-19.

In the first half of 2021, globally, we enforced against a combined total of 2,597 accounts and pieces of content for violations of our false information guidelines, almost half the number of violations from the previous reporting period. Since content on Discover and Spotlight are proactively moderated to prevent distribution of violating content at scale, the majority of these violations came from private Snaps and Stories, and the majority of these violations were made known to us via our own active moderation efforts, as well as reports from Snapchatters.  

We have always believed that when it comes to harmful content, it isn’t enough just to think about policies and enforcement — platforms need to consider their fundamental architecture and product design. From the beginning, Snapchat was built differently than traditional social media platforms, to support our primary use case of talking with close friends — rather than an open newsfeed where anyone has the right to distribute anything to anyone. Snapchat’s very design limits virality, which removes incentives for content that appeals to people’s worst instincts thereby limiting concerns associated with the spread of illegal and harmful content.

This approach also carries into our work to prevent the spread of extremist content. During the reporting period, we removed five accounts for violations of our prohibition of terrorist and extremist content, a slight decrease from the last reporting cycle. At Snap, we’re regularly monitoring developments in this space, seeking to mitigate any potential vectors for abuse on our platform. Both our platform architecture and the design of our Group Chat functionality help to limit the spread of harmful content and opportunities to organize. We offer Group Chats, but they are limited in size, are not recommended by algorithms, and are not discoverable on our platform for anyone not a member of that particular Group. 

During this period, we continued to proactively promote factual public safety information about COVID-19 to our community, including through coverage provided by our Discover editorial partners, through public service announcements (PSAs), as well as Q&As with public health officials, agencies and medical experts, and through creative tools, such as Augmented Reality Lenses and filters — all designed to remind Snapchatters of expert public health guidance. Earlier this year, as vaccines became available for young people in the U.S., we launched a new initiative with the White House to help Snapchatters answer common questions and, in July, we teamed up with the UK’s National Health Service on a similar effort. 

Going forward, we are committed to continuing to make our transparency reports more comprehensive and helpful to the many stakeholders that care deeply about online safety, transparency and multi-sector accountability. We are constantly evaluating how we can strengthen our comprehensive efforts to combat harmful content and bad actors, and are grateful to the many security and safety partners and collaborators that regularly help us to improve.

Today, as part of the Knight Foundation’s virtual symposium Lessons from the First Internet Ages, Snap’s CEO Evan Spiegel published an essay on the technology we are building to make it easier for young people to vote, educate themselves about the issues they care about, and even run for local office to make a difference in their communities through our Run for Office Mini. 

You can read Evan’s full essay below, which was originally published by the Knight Foundation here.

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My co-founder Bobby Murphy and I met at Stanford University a little over a decade ago. I was a freshman studying product design and Bobby was a junior working on a degree in mathematical and computational science. Our first project together was Future Freshman, which we believed would forever change the way high schoolers applied to college. We were wrong, and it ended up a total failure, but we learned something important—we loved working together. 

Shortly after, we started working on what would eventually become Snapchat. At the time, most social media platforms were well established, but they didn’t really provide a space for our friends to authentically express themselves. We wanted to build something to help people communicate their full range of human emotions with their friends—not just what appears to be pretty or picture-perfect. So, we designed Snapchat differently than other social media platforms at the time: our app opened to a camera that helped people talk to their close friends, instead of a newsfeed that invited people to broadcast content more widely.

Looking back to our early days when few understood our app, we could never have imagined how large the Snapchat community would eventually become. Today, over 500 million people around the world use Snapchat each month. While our business has evolved, one thing that hasn’t changed is our desire to solve problems for our community. This determination, alongside our team’s curiosity and creativity, has led to some of our most successful innovations—including our core feature of ephemerality, Stories, and augmented reality. 

We also believe one of the most powerful forms of self-expression is exercising the right to vote and—especially for our community members in the United States—participating in American democracy. This passion, combined with our problem-solving mindset, is why we are so focused on building technology to make it easier for young people to vote, educate themselves about the issues they care about, hold public officials accountable and even run for office. 

Snapchatters have always been eager to get involved and help make a difference in their communities, but our democratic processes haven’t evolved to meet the needs of younger voters. Civic engagement has not caught up with the way young people get involved with the causes that matter most to them—through their phones and with their close friends. For young first-time voters—who typically learn about voting on college campuses, or don’t attend college and therefore don’t benefit from the civic infrastructure many campuses provide—reaching them where they are is more important and more challenging than ever. During the 2020 election, when many in-person voter engagement efforts were disrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were shown just how impactful mobile-first experiences can be. 

Snapchat reaches 90 percent of people ages 13–24 in the United States, giving us a meaningful opportunity to provide this age group with a civic on-ramp that makes it easier to participate in our democracy. Since 2016, we have built several mobile tools to remove technological barriers and help Snapchatters through every stage of the voting process—including voter registration, voter education and voter participation. In recent election cycles, we partnered with TurboVote and BallotReady to help Snapchatters register to vote, view their sample ballot and look up their polling place—and then encourage their friends to do the same. We rolled out a voter guide connecting Snapchatters with resources from the NAACP, ACLU, When We All Vote, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Latino Community Foundation and APIAVote. 

This work has been encouraging: In 2020 alone, our team helped over 1.2 million Snapchatters register to vote. According to data from Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), of those Snapchatters we helped register in 2020, half were first-time voters and more than 80 percent were under the age of thirty. 

But we also know that inspiring the next generation of leaders needs to be an always-on effort—not just for high-profile elections. So, we developed a feature that prompts Snapchatters to register to vote on their eighteenth birthday. More broadly, our voter engagement tools are available year-round, and our hope is that they help lay the groundwork for a lifetime of self-expression through civic engagement. 

Looking ahead, we continue to innovate based on the feedback we receive from Snapchatters. After the 2020 presidential election, we heard from Snapchatters who were disappointed with the lack of candidates running on issues they care about. It makes sense. Representation matters, but for many young people, running for office seems unapproachable, confusing and financially unrealistic. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), legislators from the baby boomer generation have a disproportionate influence in America’s legislatures, with nearly twice as many members as their overall share of the US population. As a consequence, the gap between those who are governing us and their representation of the next generation of Americans keeps getting wider. Moreover, according to the Pipeline Initiative, over half of candidates didn’t think about running until they were recruited or encouraged by a trusted peer.

We want to do our part to make it easier for Snapchatters to make a difference in their local communities on the issues they care most about by running for office. Recently, we launched a new feature in Snapchat to help young people learn about upcoming electoral races in their community—and to nominate friends they want to see in leadership. Snapchatters can explore local opportunities sorted by various policy issues, see what each position entails and create a centralized campaign dashboard that includes a “checklist” of all the elements the candidate needs to accomplish before successfully running for public office. We’ve initially partnered with a bipartisan group of ten candidate recruitment organizations that work with potential candidates to give them the resources they need to get started, including leadership workshops and campaign training. Through encouragement with friends and training from these partner organizations, we see this as a fun and impactful way for Snapchatters to step into leadership and have their voices heard.

Every day on our app, we see the Snapchat Generation show incredible passion, creativity and innovation that’s helping make the world a better place. We will continue to do our part to help remove the barriers that have historically kept young people from showing up to vote, and we are committed to empowering future generations to speak out and play a part in designing our—and their—future. 

Today, our VP of Global Public Policy, Jennifer Stout, joined other tech platforms in testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Data Security about Snap’s approach to protecting young people on our platform. 

We were grateful for the opportunity to explain to the Subcommittee how we intentionally built Snapchat differently from traditional social media platforms, how we work to build safety and privacy directly into the design of our platform and products, and where we need to continue to improve to better protect the wellbeing of our community. We have always believed that we have a moral responsibility to put their interests first — and believe that all tech companies must take responsibility and actively protect the communities they serve. 

We welcome the Subcommittee’s ongoing efforts to investigate these critical issues — and you can read Jennifer’s full opening statement below. A PDF of the full testimony is available here.

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Testimony of Jennifer Stout Vice President of Global Public Policy, Snap Inc

Introduction

Chairman Blumenthal, Ranking Member Blackburn, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is Jennifer Stout and I serve as the Vice President of Global Public Policy at Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat. It’s an honor and privilege to be back in the Senate 23 years after first getting my start in public service as a Senate staffer, this time in a much different capacity — to speak about Snap’s approach to privacy and safety, especially as it relates to our youngest community members. I have been in this role for nearly five years, after spending almost two decades in public service, more than half of which was spent in Congress. I have tremendous respect for this institution and the work you and your staff are doing to make sure that tech platforms ensure that our youth are having safe and healthy online experiences. 

To understand Snap’s approach to protecting young people on our platform, it’s helpful to start at the beginning. Snapchat’s founders were part of the first generation to grow up with social media. Like many of their peers, they saw that while social media was capable of making a positive impact, it also had certain features that negatively impacted their friendships. These platforms encouraged people to publicly broadcast their thoughts and feelings, permanently. Our founders saw how people were constantly measuring themselves against others through “likes” and comments, trying to present a version of themselves through perfectly curated images, and carefully scripting their content because of social pressure. Social media also evolved to feature an endless feed of unvetted content, exposing people to a flood of viral, misleading, and harmful content. 

Snapchat was built as an antidote to social media. In fact, we describe ourselves as a camera company. Snapchat’s architecture was intentionally designed to empower people to express a full range of experiences and emotions with their real friends, not just the pretty and perfect moments. In the formative years of our company, there were three major ways our team pioneered new inventions to prioritize online privacy and safety. 

First, we decided to have Snapchat open to a camera instead of a feed of content. This created a blank canvas for friends to visually communicate with each other in a way that is more immersive and creative than sending text messages. 

Second, we embraced strong privacy principles, data minimization, and the idea of ephemerality, making images delete-by-default. This allowed people to genuinely express themselves in the same way they would if they were just hanging out at a park with their friends. Social media may have normalized having a permanent record of conversations online, but in real life, friends don’t break out their tape recorder to document every single conversation for public consumption or permanent retention. 

Third, we focused on connecting people who were already friends in real life by requiring that, by default, both Snapchatters opt-in to being friends in order to communicate. Because in real life, friendships are mutual. It’s not one person following the other, or random strangers entering our lives without permission or invitation. 

A Responsible Evolution

Since those early days, we have worked to continue evolving responsibly. Understanding the potential negative effects of social media, we made proactive choices to ensure that all of our future products reflected those early values. 

We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel to do that. Our team was able to learn from history when confronting the challenges posed by new technology. As Snapchat evolved over time, we were influenced by existing regulatory frameworks that govern broadcast and telecommunications when developing the parts of our app where users could share content that has the potential to reach a large audience. For instance, when you talk to your friends on the phone, you have a high expectation of privacy, whereas if you are a public broadcaster with the potential to influence the minds and opinions of many, you are subject to different standards and regulatory requirements. 

That dichotomy helped us to develop rules for the more public portions of Snapchat that are inspired by broadcast regulations. These rules protect our audience and differentiate us from other platforms. For example, Discover, our closed content platform where Snapchatters get their news and entertainment, exclusively features content from either professional media publishers who partner with us, or from artists, creators, and athletes who we choose to work with. All of these content providers have to abide by our Community Guidelines, which apply to all of the content on our platform. But Discover publisher partners also must abide by our Publisher Guidelines, which include requiring that content is fact-checked or accurate and age-gated when appropriate. And for individual creators featured in Discover, our human moderation teams review their Stories before we allow them to be promoted on the platform. While we use algorithms to feature content based on individual interests, they are applied to a limited and vetted pool of content, which is a different approach from other platforms.

On Spotlight, where creators can submit creative and entertaining videos to share with the broader Snapchat community, all content is first reviewed automatically by artificial intelligence before gaining any distribution, and then human-reviewed and moderated before it can be viewed by more than 25 people. This is done to ensure that we reduce the risk of spreading misinformation, hate speech, or other potentially harmful content.

We don’t always get it right the first time, which is why we redesign parts of Snapchat when they aren’t living up to our values. That’s what happened in 2017 when we discovered that one of our products, Stories, was making Snapchatters feel like they had to compete with celebrities and influencers for attention because content from celebrities and friends were combined in the same user interface. As a result of that observation, we decided to separate “social” content created by friends from “media'' content created by celebrities to help reduce social comparison on our platform. This redesign negatively impacted our user growth in the short-term, but it was the right thing to do for our community.

Protecting Young People on Snapchat

Our mission — to empower people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together — informed Snapchat’s fundamental architecture. Adhering to this mission has enabled us to create a platform that reflects human nature and fosters real friendships. It continues to influence our design processes and principles, our policies and practices, and the resources and tools we provide to our community. And it undergirds our constant efforts to improve how we address the inherent risks and challenges associated with serving a large online community. 

A huge part of living up to our mission has been building and maintaining trust with our community and partners, as well as parents, lawmakers, and safety experts. Those relationships have been built through the deliberate, consistent decisions we have made to put privacy and safety at the heart of our product design process. 

For example, we have adopted responsible design principles that consider the privacy and safety of new products and features right from the beginning of the development process. And we've made those principles come to life through rigorous processes. Every new feature in Snapchat goes through a defined privacy and safety review, conducted by teams that span Snap — including designers, data scientists, engineers, product managers, product counsel, policy leads, and privacy engineers — long before it sees the light of day.

While more than 80% of our community in the United States is 18 or older, we have spent a tremendous amount of time and resources to protect teenagers. We’ve made thoughtful and intentional choices to apply additional privacy and safety policies and design principles to help keep teenagers safe. That includes:

• Taking into account the unique sensitivities and considerations of minors when we design products. That’s why we intentionally make it harder for strangers to find minors by banning public profiles for people under 18 and are rolling out a feature to limit the discoverability of minors in Quick Add (friend suggestions). And why we have long deployed age-gating tools to prevent minors from viewing age-regulated content and ads. 

• Empowering Snapchatters by providing consistent and easy-to-use controls like turning location sharing off by default and offering streamlined in-app reporting for users to report concerning content or behaviors to our Trust and Safety teams. Once reported, most content is actioned in under 2 hours to minimize the potential for harm. 

• Working to develop tools that will give parents more oversight without sacrificing privacy — including plans to provide parents the ability to view their teen's friends, manage their privacy and location settings, and see who they're talking to.

• Investing in educational programs and initiatives that support the safety and mental health of our community — like Friend Check Up and Here for You. Friend Check Up prompts Snapchatters to review who they are friends with and make sure the list is made up of people they know and still want to be connected with. Here for You provides support to users who may be experiencing mental health or emotional crises by providing tools and resources from experts.

• Preventing underage use. We make no effort — and have no plans — to market to children, and individuals under the age of 13 are not permitted to create Snapchat accounts. When registering for an account, individuals are required to provide their date of birth, and the registration process fails if a user inputs an age under the age of 13. We have also implemented a new safeguard that prevents Snapchat users between 13-17 with existing accounts from updating their birthday to an age of 18 or above. Specifically, if a minor attempts to change their year of birth to an age over 18, we will prevent the change as a way to ensure that users are not accessing age-inappropriate content within Snapchat.

Conclusion and Looking Ahead

We're always striving for new ways to keep our community safe, and we have more work left to do. We know that online safety is a shared responsibility, spanning a host of sectors and actors. We are committed to doing our part in concert with safety partners including our Safety Advisory Board, technology industry peers, government, and civil society. From technology-focused and awareness-raising initiatives, to research and best practice sharing, we are actively engaged with organizations dedicated to protecting minors online. We also know that there are many complex problems and technical challenges across our industry, including age verification of minors, and we remain committed to working with partners and policymakers to identify robust industry-wide solutions.         

Protecting the wellbeing of Snapchatters is something we approach with both humility and steadfast determination. Over 500 million people around the world use Snapchat every month and while 95% of our users say Snapchat makes them feel happy, we have a moral responsibility to take into account their best interests in everything we do. That’s especially true as we innovate with augmented reality — which has the potential to positively contribute to the way we work, shop, learn, and communicate. We will apply those same founding values and principles as we continue to experiment with new technologies like the next generation of augmented reality. 

As we look to the future, computing and technology will become increasingly integrated into our daily lives. We believe that regulation is necessary but given the speed at which technology develops and the rate at which regulation can be implemented, regulation alone can’t get the job done. Technology companies must take responsibility and actively protect the communities they serve. 

If they don't, the government must act swiftly to hold them accountable. We fully support the Subcommittee’s efforts to investigate these issues and welcome a collaborative approach to problem solving that keeps our society safe. 

Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before you today and discuss these critical issues. I look forward to answering your questions.

Drugs laced with fentanyl have contributed to an alarming increase in overdose deaths in the United States in recent years. Fentanyl is a potent opioid, deadly in quantities as small as one grain of sand. Drug dealers often use fentanyl to make counterfeit prescription pills, like Vicodin or Xanax, which when ingested can lead to death. 

We have heard devastating stories from families impacted by this crisis, including cases where fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills were purchased from drug dealers on Snapchat. We are determined to remove illegal drug sales from our platform, and we have been investing in proactive detection and collaboration with law enforcement to hold drug dealers accountable for the harm they are causing our community. 

We believe it is our responsibility to keep our community safe on Snapchat and we have made significant operational improvements over the past year to eradicate drug sales from our platform and we are continually working to improve. Our work here is never done, but we want to communicate updates as we make progress so that our community can monitor our progress and hold us accountable.

Our most important investments over the past year have included significant investments in our Law Enforcement Operations, growing our team who supports valid law enforcement requests to meaningfully improve how quickly we can respond. While we still have work to do, across all types of law enforcement requests we receive, our response times have improved 85% year over year, and in the case of emergency disclosure requests, our 24/7 team usually responds within 30 mins.

We have significantly improved our proactive detection capabilities to remove drug dealers from our platform before they are able to harm our community. Our enforcement rates have increased by 112% during the first half of 2021, and we have increased proactive detection rates by 260%. Nearly two-thirds of drug-related content is detected proactively by our artificial intelligence systems, with the balance reported by our community and enforced by our team. We’ve also worked to improve our in-app reporting tools to make it easier and faster for our community to report drug-related content.

We will continue to work to strike the right balance between safety and privacy on our platform so that we can empower our community to express themselves without fear of harm. By design, Snapchatters control who can contact them and must opt-in to new conversations with friends. If a member of our community reports inappropriate content, it is escalated to our Trust & Safety team so that we are able to take appropriate action. We are also working on new family safety tools to provide more ways for parents to partner together with their teenagers to stay safe on Snapchat.

We also want to play a role in educating our community about the dangers of fentanyl. To inform our efforts, we commissioned research from Morning Consult to understand how young people perceive prescription drugs and fentanyl, and are sharing those findings here. We learned that teenagers are suffering from high levels of stress and anxiety, and are experimenting with the use of prescription drugs without a prescription as a coping strategy. It was also clear from the research that many people either don’t know enough about fentanyl to assess the danger, or believe fentanyl is less dangerous than heroin or cocaine. This lack of awareness can have devastating consequences when just one counterfeit pill laced with fentanyl can kill.

We have developed a new in-app education portal called Heads Up that distributes content from expert organizations such as Song for Charlie, Shatterproof, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), with additional resources from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be added in the coming weeks. This means that if someone on Snapchat searches for drug-related keywords, Heads Up will show relevant educational content designed to prevent harm to our community.

In partnership with Song for Charlie, we have developed a video advertising campaign that has already been viewed over 260 million times on Snapchat, and we are rolling out a new national filter that raises awareness of the dangers of fentanyl and counterfeit pills and directs Snapchatters to the new Heads Up educational portal. A new episode of Good Luck America, a Snap Original news show, will premiere soon, continuing a special edition series of episodes devoted to educating our community about the fentanyl crisis.

We hope that our ongoing operational improvements and educational efforts will help to keep our community safe from the devastating impacts of the fentanyl crisis. We are heartbroken that drugs have taken the lives of people in our community. We deeply appreciate the generosity and kindness of families who have come forward to share their stories, collaborate, and hold us accountable for making progress. We will work tirelessly to do better and do more to keep our community safe.

- Team Snap

As the world continues to battle the latest developments of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more important than ever to ensure the public has access to accurate, credible information. The rapid spread of false information can pose serious threats to our institutions and public health, and we believe we’re in a moment in which companies, organizations, and individuals should take stock of their efforts to help prevent it.

In that spirit, we thought it would be helpful to walk through our long held approach to preventing the spread of false information on Snapchat, and the ways we are working to improve. 

Our approach has always started with the architecture of our platform. Snapchat was originally built to help people talk to their close friends, rather than provide the opportunity to broadcast messages across the app. And we have always felt a deep responsibility to make sure that the news and information our community sees on Snapchat is credible, from trusted and clear sources. 

These underlying principles have informed our product design and policy decisions as Snapchat has continued to evolve over the years. 

• Across our app, we don’t allow unvetted content the opportunity to ‘go viral.’ Snapchat does not offer an unmoderated open newsfeed where unvetted individuals or publishers can broadcast false information. Our content platform, Discover, only features content from vetted media publishers and content creators. Our entertainment platform, Spotlight, is proactively moderated before content can reach a large audience. We offer Group Chats, but they are limited in size, are not recommended by algorithms, and are not discoverable on our platform if you are not a member of that Group.

• Our guidelines have long prohibited the spread of false information. Both our Community Guidelines, which apply equally to all Snapchatters, and our content guidelines, which apply to our Discover partners, prohibit the spread of misinformation that can cause harm, including conspiracy theories, denying the existence of tragic events, unsubstantiated medical claims, or undermining the integrity of civic processes.  We regularly review and update our policies as new forms of misinformation become more prevalent: for example, ahead of the 2020 election, we updated our guidelines to make clear that manipulated media intended to mislead -- or deepfakes -- were prohibited.

• Our approach to enforcing against content that includes false information is straightforward -- we don’t label it, we completely remove it. When we find content that violates our guidelines, our policy is to simply take it down, which immediately reduces the risk of it being shared more widely. 

• We evaluate the safety and privacy impacts of all new features during the front end of the product development process -- which includes examining potential vectors for misuse. We have internal measures in place to evaluate the potential impact of a new feature on the safety, privacy, and wellbeing of both Snapchatters, our individual users and society during the product development process -- and if we think it will become an avenue for bad actors to share false information, it doesn’t get released.

• We use human review to fact check all political and advocacy ads. As with all content on Snapchat, we prohibit false information and deceptive practices in our advertising. All political ads, including election-related ads, issue advocacy ads, and issue ads, must include a transparent “paid for” message that discloses the sponsoring organization. We use human review to fact check all political ads, and provide information about all ads that pass our review in our Political Ads library.

• We are committed to increasing transparency into our efforts to combat false information. Our most recent Transparency Report, which covered the second half of 2020, included several new elements, including data about our efforts to enforce against false information globally. During this period, we took action against 5,841 pieces of content and accounts for violations of our policies on false information -- and we plan to provide more detailed breakdowns of these violations in our future reports. 

As we keep working to remove incentives for sharing false information, both through our product design choices and our policies, we’re also focused on partnering with experts to promote factual health and safety information. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have worked closely with public health officials and agencies, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to publish regular safety updates, and our news partners around the world have produced constant coverage of the pandemic. Earlier this Spring, as vaccines became available for young people in the US, we launched a new effort with the White House to help Snapchatters answer common questions, and in July, we teamed up with the UK’s National Health Service on a similar effort. 

Doing our part to help our community stay safe and healthy is an ongoing priority for us, and we will continue to explore innovative approaches to reach Snapchatters where they are, while strengthening our efforts to protect Snapchat from the false information epidemic. 

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published new data showing that drug overdose deaths in the U.S have soared to record levels -- increasing more than 30% in 2020 and finding that this spike was driven by the prevalence of fentanyl, a lethal substance, and compounded by stressors from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

According to Song for Charlie, a national organization focused on educating young people about the dangers of fentanyl, many of these deaths occur from taking a single pill disguised as a legitimate prescription medication, but actually was counterfeit -- containing fentanyl. And young people, who often experiment with prescription pills such as Xanax and Percocet, are especially vulnerable.

We first began working with Song for Charlie earlier this year to better understand the fentanyl epidemic and identify ways we and other tech companies can help make a difference. Today they are launching a new nationwide public awareness campaign to reach young people where they are -- on tech platforms -- and educate them about the hidden dangers of these fake prescription pills laced with fentanyl.  We are grateful to partner with Song for Charlie to help inform our Snapchat community on how to protect themselves and their loved ones. 

As part of this effort, our in-house news show, Good Luck America, dedicated a special episode to the fentanyl epidemic featuring an interview with Song for Charlie Founder, Ed Ternan, who tragically lost his 22-year old son Charlie after taking a fake prescription pill. You can watch the full episode below, or on our Discover content platform.  

In addition, Snapchatters can now watch PSAs produced by Song for Charlie on our Discover platform and use a new Augmented Reality (AR) lens that features key facts on the dangers of fentanyl. The lens also links to more information to help educate and inform their closest friends and encourages people to take the “No Random Pills” pledge. This initial launch is the first in a sustained partnership between Song for Charlie and Snap, which will include additional in-app education and public awareness initiatives. 

As we work to raise awareness, we also are working to strengthen our efforts to better prevent, detect and combat drug-related activity on Snapchat. Our guidelines prohibit the sale or promotion of illegal drugs, and when we proactively detect this type of content or it is reported to us, our Trust and Safety teams take quick action. 

We block drug-related terms, including slang, from usernames or being searchable on Snapchat, and regularly audit these block lists with the latest language, working closely with third-party experts. We are also constantly updating our machine learning tools for proactively identifying images, words, emojis and other likely indicators of drug-related accounts, along with other capabilities for finding and stopping drug transactions. 

We are committed to continuing to do our part to help our community protect themselves and their friends, while we keep improving our capabilities for fighting drug dealers and drug-related content online.

We are saddened and appalled by the racist abuse that has been directed at England footballers on several online platforms following the Euro 2020 final. We wanted to give an overview of our ongoing work to combat racism, hate speech, harassment and abuse on Snapchat, as well as the steps we are taking to educate our community.

We have put a lot of work into designing a platform that prevents the opportunity for hate speech or abuse to spread. Snapchat is designed differently than traditional social media. The app is designed around the camera to create a way for people to communicate more meaningfully and authentically, and with their real friends and loved ones, rather than people that they don’t know. 

Snapchat does not offer an open news feed where unvetted publishers or individuals have an opportunity to broadcast hate or abusive content. Our Discover platform  for news and entertainment, and our Spotlight platform  for the community’s best Snaps, are curated and moderated environments. This means that content in Discover or Spotlight is provided either by our professional media partners, who agree to abide by strict Content Guidelines, or is user-generated content that is pre-moderated using human review, prior to being surfaced to large groups of Snapchatters. And Snapchat does not enable public comments which can facilitate abuse.

We have also made clear that we will not promote accounts that are linked to people who incite racism, whether they do so on or off our platform, most notably when first taking the decision to stop promoting President Trump’s account on Discover in June of 2020.

These guardrails help keep activity that violates our policies  from public areas of our platform. In 2018, Snap signed onto the European Commission’s Code of Conduct on hate speech, which, as part of its oversight process, collects reports from 39 NGOs specializing in reporting online hate. In the Commission’s two most recent reports on compliance with the code, there were zero reports of hate speech on Snapchat. Our own transparency report shows that, for the UK during the latest six month reporting period, we took action against 6,734 accounts. The vast majority of this content concerned reported private Snaps, not on public content areas -- reducing any wider impact. 

We also work hard to combat illegal and harmful activity on the private communications side of Snapchat. We provide easy-to-use in-app reporting tools where Snapchatters can notify us about any illegal or harmful activity. Our global, 24/7 Trust & Safety team reviews reports and takes appropriate action against violating accounts. The team is trained to identify a variety of signals when it comes to racist language, including the use of emojis to represent racial slurs or stereotypes. We keep abreast of the use of emojis and other forms of expression such as text based captions to understand emerging trends that reflect potential abuse, and use this insight to constantly evolve our policies in this area.

There is of course more that we can do, including to educate our community, and we are currently working on a programme to elevate black British stories through the power of augmented reality. Our first initiative earlier this year was an augmented reality (AR) experience designed in partnership with Kick It Out and a collective of black creatives called Kugali to commemorate four of England's greatest black footballers.

Ultimately, there is no place on Snapchat for discrimination, racism or abuse. We will keep working hard to prevent this content from surfacing, and to take quick and effective action when it does occur.

-Henry Turnbull, Head of Public Policy UK & Nordics

It’s great to share our work with the United Kingdom (UK) government to support the UK National Health Service’s (NHS) ‘Every Vaccination Gives Us Hope’ campaign.  

Snapchat reaches over 90% of 13 to 24 year olds in the UK, and with our community playing such a key part of the lives of young people, it’s vital that it is a source of accurate and trusted resources so they can stay safe, healthy and informed. 

As the COVID-19 vaccine is now available to all adults over the age of 18 in the UK, it’s important for Snapchatters to have access to trusted and accurate information  With that in mind, we have expanded ‘Here For You’ - our in-app mental health and wellbeing resource - dedicated to the latest Coronavirus guidance to include expert resources from the NHS about the vaccine.

In addition, we have launched creative tools in collaboration with the UK Government - including stickers, lenses and filters - available for Snapchatters to use that allow them to share the latest guidance from the NHS and encourage Snapchatters to share their vaccine status with friends and family.

Finally, from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Snap Star account, Snapchatters submitted questions to be answered by medical experts Dr. Kiren Collison, the interim Deputy Medical Director for Primary Care for NHS England and Dr. Karen Raj, a doctor with the NHS. The Q&A sessions are available to watch on the Prime Minister’s profile.

We continue to explore new ways we can collaborate with credible partners to help support the health and wellbeing of our Snapchat community.

To learn more about the vaccine in the U.K, please visit: www.nhs.uk/covidvaccine 

- Stephen Collins, Sr. Director of Public Policy

At Snap, our goal is to design products and build technology that nurtures and supports real friendships in a healthy, safe and fun environment. We are constantly working to improve the ways we do that — from our policies and Community Guidelines, to our tools for preventing, detecting and enforcing against harmful content, as well as initiatives that help educate and empower our community. 

We are committed to providing more transparency about the prevalence of content that violates our guidelines, how we enforce our policies, how we respond to law enforcement and government requests for information, and where we seek to provide more insight in the future. We publish transparency reports twice a year to provide insight into these efforts, and are also committed to making these reports more comprehensive and helpful to the many stakeholders who care deeply about online safety and transparency.

Today we’re releasing our transparency report for the second half of 2020, which covers the period of July 1 - December 31 of that year, which you can read in full here. As with our previous reports, it shares data about violations globally during this period; the number of content reports we received and enforced against across specific categories of violations; how we responded to requests from law enforcement and governments; and our enforcements broken down by country.

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our transparency efforts, this report also includes several new elements. For the first time, we are sharing our Violative View Rate (VVR) which is the proportion of all Snaps (or views) that contained content that violated our guidelines. During this period, our VVR was 0.08 percent, which means that out of every 10,000 views of content on Snap, eight contained content that violated our guidelines. Every day, more than five billion Snaps are created using our Snapchat camera on average. During the second half of 2020, we enforced against 5,543,281 pieces of content globally that violated our guidelines. 

Additionally, our report shares new insights about our enforcement against false information globally — an effort that was especially important as the world continued to battle a global pandemic, and efforts to undermine democratic institutions. During this time frame, we took action against 5,841 pieces of content and accounts for violations of our guidelines prohibiting the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories that can cause harm. 

We have always believed that when it comes to harmful content, it isn’t enough just to think about policies and enforcement, platforms need to think about their fundamental architecture and product design. Across our app, Snapchat limits virality, which removes incentives for harmful and sensationalized content, and opportunities to organize. Our report shares more details about our product design decisions, and our work to promote factual news and information to Snapchatters. 

Going forward, we are focused on providing greater insights in future reports, such as expanding on subcategories of violating data. We are constantly evaluating how we can strengthen our comprehensive efforts to combat harmful content and bad actors, and are grateful to the many security and safety partners who are always helping us improve.

Today marks the 50th Anniversary of the ratification of the 26th Amendment -- the amendment that gave 18-year-olds the right to vote in all US elections and outlawed age discrimination among eligible voters. 

At Snap, we believe that one of the most powerful forms of self-expression is exercising the right to vote and participating in our democracy. Snapchat reaches 90% of 13-24 year olds in the United States, giving us an incredible opportunity to provide our youngest voters with tools that make it easier to participate in our democracy. 

Since 2016, we’ve invested in native to mobile civic products and partnerships designed to tackle challenges to voter registration, education, and participation to help make voting easier. We’ve learned that supporting the next generation of leaders needs to be a year-round effort - not just for high-profile election seasons.

That’s why in 2018, we launched a feature that automatically prompts Snapchatters on their 18th birthday to register to vote. Each month an average of 400,000 Snapchatters in the United States receive a notification to register to vote as they celebrate their birthday.

As part of a research collaboration with Tufts’ University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), Snap found that college campuses are significant entry points for first-time voters, but only 36% of 18 to 23-year-olds are enrolled in college full time, which means nearly two-thirds don’t have the same civic and political engagement opportunities. Given our unique reach among young Americans, Snap is able to help bridge the gap in access to civic resources. 

Registering voters on their 18th birthday is just one step towards empowering Snapchatters to be lifelong civic participants and make their voices heard. 

Before the 2020 US election, we launched a collection of mobile-first tools with support from TurboVote and BallotReady to help Snapchatters register to vote, understand their ballot, request absentee ballots and make a plan to vote by-mail or in-person, learn about voter protection resources like the Election Protection hotline, and help their friends vote by sharing Snaps with educational filters and lenses.

We continue to work to inspire the next generation of Americans to engage in a lifetime of self-expression through civic engagement year-round - and do our part to help deliver on the promise of the 26th Amendment.

- Sofia Gross, Head of Policy Partnerships and Social Impact