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Corporate-Enabled Child Abuse and Snapchat Is the Crime Scene




What’s happening on Snapchat isn’t a “tech challenge” or a “youth behaviour issue.” It’s corporate-enabled child abuse. Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch have dropped a brutal, evidence-loaded report that rips the mask off the ghost icon. If you missed it, here’s the core message:

"Snapchat is knowingly and systematically harming children. At an industrial scale".

This isn’t just about “some bad actors.” This is about a billion-dollar company building and maintaining a platform that predators rely on, that drug dealers thrive in, and that abusers use as their hunting ground and Snapchat is doing jack shit to stop it.

According to Snap’s own internal comms, they receive 10,000 reports of sextortion per month. And they still refuse to implement meaningful safety changes.

So how the hell is anyone in Australia........hell, anywhere still anti-ban?


Let’s talk about the rising chorus of critics many of them in “cyber safety,” youth wellbeing, and academia who argue against restricting apps like Snapchat. You know the line “Banning isn’t the answer.” “We need to teach them to navigate.” “It’s about resilience, not removal.”

Children do not learn digital literacy from a disappearing dick pic. No young person has ever built resilience while being extorted for nudes or sold fentanyl-laced pills via Snap Map. And no teen was ever “empowered” by being ghosted, harassed, blackmailed, or groomed in a vanishing message thread.

I sit on a taskforce with police and health professionals. Kids are buying vapes on Snapchat, getting addicted, and when they can’t afford the next hit they’re trafficked.That’s the reality. No one learns digital literacy from a drug deal in a disappearing chat. And no one builds resilience by being pimped out to pay off a debt!!!!

So if you’re still clinging to the idea that “bans don’t work,” I need you to ask yourself.......Who are you protecting? Because it sure as hell isn’t the kids.

If your strategy requires children to survive harm in order to learn from it, you’re not building capacity you’re building cover for the tech companies doing the damage.

Wake up.


And if you still think “early exposure with guidance” is the hill to die on, ask yourself this, Guidance from who?  Certainly not from Snapchat. They’ve made it untraceable by design. Snapchat is the opposite of education. It’s a black box of addictive UX, deliberately engineered opacity, and features that actively prevent adults from intervening.

"But we can’t ban it—they’ll just go elsewhere."

Stop. That’s Big Tech’s favourite excuse, and it’s pure rot. We ban harmful environments in the real world all the time. You can’t sell booze to kids because “they’ll find a way.”You can’t hand a 12-year-old the keys to a car because “they’ll drive eventually.” So why are we still letting tech companies run zero-verification child data farms under the guise of “connection”? If your digital safety strategy boils down to “they’ll do it anyway,” you’re not managing risk you’re surrendering to it.

This is systemic, deliberate, and brutal.

Snapchat’s entire business model hinges on creating a user experience that feels unmonitored, untouchable, and untraceable. That’s the appeal. That’s the point. And in doing so, they’ve created the perfect storm for:

  • Sextortion

  • Grooming

  • Suicide baiting

  • Drug sales

  • Unrelenting harassment

And yet they refuse age verification. In Australia they even tried to call themselves a message service when the ban was announced.  They refuse accountability. They refuse to remove features that actively endanger kids. Because safety doesn’t drive growth. Addiction does.

The safety theatre must burn.

We do not need more “trusted partner” programs with Snap. We do not need more resources written with Snap’s approval. And we sure as hell do not need their blood money sponsoring wellbeing summits and people calling themselves cyber safety experts.  If you're a charity, a mental health org, or a school education provider taking Snap’s (or any other platforms) money in any way shape or form while parroting “we care about kids” you’re laundering harm. And if you block or silence critics, who call this out? You’ve chosen your side. And it’s not ours.

Pick your line in the sand. Now.

Because here’s the truth, there is no safe version of Snapchat for kids. None. It’s built to evade safety. That’s the design. So either we stand up and say enough or we keep trading child protection for corporate access. There is no neutral here. You're either on the side of systemic child safety or you're in service of the machine. And if you're still trying to “find the balance”? Kids are the ones being crushed underneath it.

 

Read the full report from Haidt and Rausch here: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-snapchat


And keep a watch for this, I am proud to have worked with the incredible Olivia Carville from Bloomberg in the past on a Roblox story and this documentary is driven by her work. Can't Look Away follows a team of lawyers battling tech giants, fighting for families whose children suffered devastating harm linked to social media. The film serves as both a wake-up call about the dangers of social media and a call to action to protect future generations. 


 

 
 
 

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