At Snap, privacy, safety, and transparency have always been core to how we operate. We have protections in place for all members of our community and offer additional safeguards for our teenage Snapchatters. Our long standing values are aligned with the principles of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and we share their goals to create a safe online environment.
We are fully committing to ensuring we meet our DSA requirements by 25 August, and are making a number of updates for our Snapchatters in the European Union (EU), including:
1. Giving Snapchatters the ability to control the content they’re shown.
Snapchat is primarily a visual messaging platform. There are two parts of Snapchat where we show public content that could reach a large audience - the Discover section of the Stories tab and the Spotlight tab. The content shown in these sections is personalised to the viewer, ensuring that people have an experience that is relevant for them. We are transparent about what content is eligible to be shown to our community - and we set a higher bar for content that is eligible to be recommended.
As part of our DSA response, all Snapchatters in the EU will now have the ability to better understand why content is being shown to them and have the ability to opt out of a personalised Discover and Spotlight content experience. We have developed a simple guide to describe how personalisation works on Snapchat.
2. A new notification and appeals process for content or account removals
We have strict community guidelines that we expect everyone to follow when using Snapchat. Anyone can easily report content or accounts that they think violate these guidelines through our in-app or online reporting tools.
We will now be notifying people with information as to why their account and certain content has been removed and easily allow them to appeal the decision. These features will initially be available to Snapchatters in the EU before rolling out to our global community over the coming months.
As part of the DSA, we have also been building an integration to the European Commission’s Transparency API, which will provide certain information about enforcement decisions that have been made about EU based accounts or content.
3. Updating our advertising
As we announced earlier in the month, we have been making a number of updates to our advertising for Snapchatters in the EU and UK, including:
Restricting personalised advertising for Snapchatters aged 13 - 17 in the EU and UK - Most targeting and optimisation tools will no longer be available for advertisers to personalise ads for Snapchatters in the EU and UK under the age of 18. Now, personalisation of ads to these Snapchatters will be limited to basic essential information, like language settings, age and location.
Offering Snapchatters in the EU aged 18+ a new level of advertising transparency and control - tapping on the “why am I seeing this ad” will now give Snapchatters in the EU more details about why that ad was shown to them and these Snapchatters will now also be able to limit personalisation of ads shown to them. This adds to the existing advertising controls all Snapchatters have had such as the ability to hide some types of ads in the ads menu and to edit the Snap lifestyle interest categories allocated to them.
Creating a library for EU targeted advertisements - Anyone can search this digital library of adverts shown in the EU and they can see details of paid advertising campaigns such as who paid for the ad, a visual of the creative, campaign length, impressions broken down by EU country and information about the targeting applied.
4. Committed to compliance
To ensure we remain DSA compliant we have appointed DSA compliance officers who will be responsible for overseeing our DSA requirements and monitor compliance across multiple parts of the business.
Fundamentally, we believe regulation is no substitute for businesses doing the right thing and taking responsibility for their products and platforms
That’s why we’ve always taken a safety and privacy by design approach to how we build our platforms and features, and we are committed to being a platform where people can safely connect, express themselves visually, and have fun together.