Parents say Snapchat makes it easy for drug dealers to sell to their kids

An Ontario father says he lives in constant fear that his 15-year-old son will overdose — and blames the social media app Snapchat. 

“He can’t get through the day without using drugs,” said Roger, a pseudonym CBC is using to protect his son’s identity.

The addiction issues began with cannabis use in eighth grade, says Roger, but recently, he says his son began using psychedelics like LSD.

“It became very scary going from ‘It’s just a little weed’ to something like that,” he said, adding that his son uses the social messaging app Snapchat to get drugs, and there’s not much he can do to stop it.

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On occasion, he’s come upon dealers who’ve communicated with his son and reported them to the app. He says two accounts he reported were then removed, but it’s hit and miss and he says tracking them is generally very challenging.

“I can see that he’s talked to people. I can’t see the messages,” he said.

Snapchat messages — or snaps — are deleted once they’re viewed by the recipient, making it difficult to report illicit activity to authorities or to Snap Inc., which owns the app. The app also alerts people when a screenshot is taken of their messages. 

Though Snapchat says it is “diligently” working to stop drug dealers from abusing the platform, parents and other critics say those efforts are not enough. 

“You can’t click on something that doesn’t exist to flag it,” Roger said. “There’s no mechanism.” 

Lawsuit calls app an ‘open-air drug market’

A U.S. lawsuit has been filed against Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company, on behalf of family members of more than 60 youths who allegedly overdosed on drugs purchased on Snapchat. The lawsuit alleges the app’s features have made children an easy target for drug dealers and has helped fuel fentanyl poisoning deaths among minors.

“Snap and Snapchat’s role in illicit drug sales to teens was the foreseeable result of the designs, structures, and policies Snap chose to implement to increase its revenues,” claims the lawsuit.

It alleges Snapchat’s disappearing messages — a unique function of the app — make it hard for parents and law enforcement to track evidence of illegal activity, while its geolocation function allows drug dealers to target users to arrange meetups.

The app’s My Eyes Only feature allows users to store private snaps, photos and videos in a hidden, passcode-protected folder within the app. The lawsuit maintains that this function obstructs parents’ ability to supervise their children’s online interactions.

“Despite Snap promoting and portraying Snapchat as a ‘goofy’ app for kids to use to send each other silly pictures, its known common use is as an ‘open-air drug market’,” reads the lawsuit. 

Lawyer Matthew Bergman, with the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC) that filed the suit, tells Go Public there’s been a lack of accountability when it comes to combating the sale of drugs on Snapchat.

Bergman says they believe that by holding Snap Inc. financially accountable, they will be able to instill in them a “change of behaviour that will make these platforms safer and less conducive to drug sales.” 

In December 2024, California’s appeals court denied Snap Inc.’s petition to dismiss the case.

‘The dose that killed him was delivered to our front yard’

Sam Chapman and his wife, Laura Berman, in California are a part of that legal action.

Their son Sammy died in 2021 at age 16 after overdosing on a pill he purchased from someone he met on Snapchat, his father says. They later found out from the toxicology report that it contained fentanyl.

“The dose that killed him was delivered to our front yard like a pizza after we were asleep. And we found Sammy dead,” Chapman told Go Public in an interview at his home in Manhattan Beach, Calif.

“I think that Snapchat executives belong in prison,” Chapman said, adding drug dealers have learned to bypass restrictions on the app to avoid getting caught.

“The drug dealers use emojis and slang to get by the filters,” he said. 

In a public education campaign, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) said that posts and stories on social media apps, including Snapchat, “are often accompanied by known code words and emojis that are used to market and sell illicit and deadly drugs on social media. These code words and emojis are designed to evade detection by law enforcement and by the preset algorithms used by social media platforms.”

Human-first approach needed, analyst says

In an emailed statement to CBC News, Snapchat said the sale of illicit drugs on the app is against its community guidelines and the company is “working diligently to stop drug dealers from abusing our platform.”

Snapchat says it uses tools like keyword detection and artificial intelligence to find and shut down accounts used by dealers. 

Digital anthropologist and social media analyst Giles Crouch, based in Bedford, N.S., says that approach is not enough, because A.I. only works well with detecting text. For example, he says that the technology might pick up when a post contains the word fentanyl, making it easy to censor that.

“But the challenge is what teens are using the most … a mixture of text and emojis,” he said.

“What they need to take is a more human-centric and human-first approach.”

Snapchat says on top of blocking search results for illicit drug-related terms, it’s also working with “experts and other tech companies to share patterns and signals of drug-related content and activity.”

The social media company says it also has an in-house “Law Enforcement Operations team” that reviews requests from police for data related to their investigations.

“While content on Snapchat deletes by default — designed to reflect the nature of real-life conversations between friends — we are able to preserve content that is reported to us,” the company wrote in a statement emailed to Go Public.

But Chicago-based Zamaan Qureshi, with youth advocacy group Design It For Us, says the company needs to make fundamental changes to the app’s features that allow predators to thrive online. 

“It’s a great place for young people to connect. But we cannot ignore the detrimental impacts that this application has had for many young people,” he said.

“The allure of Snapchat is that all of your messages and the photos you send, the stories you post, disappear after 24 hours or disappear right away after you send them. And so as a result, it creates this black box of social media where you don’t have any record of what you sent,” he said.

“Parents have no knowledge of what was sent.”

Parental controls not enough, father says

Snap Inc. says their parental control features allow parents to see who their children are talking to, who their friends are and to report any accounts that may be of concern.

The company also says recent updates give parents the ability to view their child’s privacy and safety settings and to use the app’s geolocation feature to see their child’s location. 

But Roger, the Ontario father worried about his son, isn’t convinced the app’s parental controls are effective. If they were, he says, he wouldn’t be playing “whack-a-mole” when it comes to reporting drug dealers.

“When one account closes, another one opens and the dealer’s back in business,” he said, noting that it’s the features themselves, like disappearing messages, that make it hard to stay on top of his son’s online activity.

“I cried driving past a cemetery because I started thinking about, ‘OK, if my son dies, how are we going to do this?’ And I started planning his funeral in my head,” he said. 

“I have one son. And if I lost him, my world would be over.

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