Testimony of Jennifer StoutVice President of Global Public Policy, Snap Inc
Hearing before the United States Senate Committee on Science, Commerce, andTransportation
Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security
October 26, 2021
Introduction
Chairman Blumenthal, Ranking Member Blackburn, and members of the Subcommittee, thankyou for the opportunity to appear before you today. My name is Jennifer Stout and I serve as theVice President of Global Public Policy at Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat. It’s anhonor 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 toprivacy and safety, especially as it relates to our youngest community members. I have been inthis role for nearly five years, after spending almost two decades in public service, more thanhalf 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 startat the beginning. Snapchat’s founders were part of the first generation to grow up with socialmedia. Like many of their peers, they saw that while social media was capable of making apositive impact, it also had certain features that negatively impacted their friendships. Theseplatforms 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, andcarefully 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 harmfulcontent.
Snapchat was built as an antidote to social media. In fact, we describe ourselves as a cameracompany. Snapchat’s architecture was intentionally designed to empower people to express afull range of experiences and emotions with their real friends, not just the pretty and perfectmoments. In the formative years of our company, there were three major ways our teampioneered 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 createda blank canvas for friends to visually communicate with each other in a way that is more
immersive and creative than sending text messages.

1Second, we embraced strong privacy principles, data minimization, and the idea ofephemerality, making images delete-by-default. This allowed people to genuinely expressthemselves 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 inreal 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 thepotential negative effects of social media, we made proactive choices to ensure that all of ourfuture products reflected those early values.
We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel to do that. Our team was able to learn from history whenconfronting the challenges posed by new technology. As Snapchat evolved over time, we wereinfluenced 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 toreach a large audience. For instance, when you talk to your friends on the phone, you have ahigh expectation of privacy, whereas if you are a public broadcaster with the potential toinfluence 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 areinspired by broadcast regulations. These rules protect our audience and differentiate us fromother 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 workwith. All of these content providers have to abide by our Community Guidelines, which apply toall of the content on our platform. But Discover publisher partners also must abide by ourPublisher Guidelines, which include requiring that content is fact-checked or accurate andage-gated when appropriate. And for individual creators featured in Discover, our humanmoderation 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 alimited 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 thebroader Snapchat community, all content is first reviewed automatically by artificial intelligence
before gaining any distribution, and then human-reviewed and moderated before it can be2

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 ourproducts, Stories, was making Snapchatters feel like they had to compete with celebrities andinfluencers for attention because content from celebrities and friends were combined in thesame 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 comparisonon 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 theworld, and have fun together — informed Snapchat’s fundamental architecture. Adhering to thismission has enabled us to create a platform that reflects human nature and fosters realfriendships. It continues to influence our design processes and principles, our policies andpractices, and the resources and tools we provide to our community. And it undergirds ourconstant efforts to improve how we address the inherent risks and challenges associated withserving a large online community.
A huge part of living up to our mission has been building and maintaining trust with ourcommunity 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 andsafety at the heart of our product design process.
For example, we have adopted responsible design principles that consider the privacy andsafety 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 atremendous amount of time and resources to protect teenagers. We’ve made thoughtful andintentional 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 findminors 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 long3

deployed age-gating tools to prevent minors from viewing age-regulated content andads.
●

Empowering Snapchatters by providing consistent and easy-to-use controls liketurning 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 andmental 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 thelist 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 tochildren, 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 dateof 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 thechange 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 todo. 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 andawareness-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 ofminors, 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 andsteadfast determination. Over 500 million people around the world use Snapchat every monthand 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 true4

as we innovate with augmented reality — which has the potential to positively contribute to theway we work, shop, learn, and communicate. We will apply those same founding values andprinciples as we continue to experiment with new technologies like the next generation ofaugmented reality.
As we look to the future, computing and technology will become increasingly integrated into ourdaily 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 theyserve.
If they don't, the government must act swiftly to hold them accountable. We fully support theSubcommittee’s efforts to investigate these issues and welcome a collaborative approach toproblem solving that keeps our society safe.
Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before you today and discuss these criticalissues. I look forward to answering your questions.
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