Pa. attorney general sues Snapchat for its addictiveness and disappearing messages

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Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday is suing Snap Inc., alleging the company misleads parents about mature content on Snapchat while using features designed to keep children compulsively engaged with the social media platform.

The civil complaint, filed Tuesday in Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas, accuses Snap of violating Pennsylvania’s consumer protection law and seeks civil penalties and a court order requiring the company to change how it markets Snapchat to minors and how easily they can access it.

“The lawsuit also demands that Snapchat finally come clean about the addictiveness of their app and takes real action to protect young users,” Sunday told reporters. “This is a very serious legal action with the end goal of being an overhaul of how Snapchat markets and advertises its app.”

In a statement sent to WHYY News, a Snap spokesperson said the allegations “fundamentally misrepresent our platform and our approach to teen safety.”

Misrepresenting age and addictiveness

The news comes just two weeks after the attorney general’s office filed a similar lawsuit against TikTok, accusing that platform of similarly deceptive practices and addictive design features. This month, Montgomery County also filed a lawsuit against Meta, Snap, TikTok, Google and other tech companies, alleging that their social media platforms harm the mental health of the more than 180,000 minors who live there.

The new lawsuit alleges Snap — like TikTok — understates the frequency of sexual material, nudity, drug use and content involving suicide or self-harm to obtain a rating indicating that Snapchat is appropriate for users 13 and older.

Sunday argued that parents rely on those ratings because they cannot realistically investigate everything their children might encounter on each social media platform.

“Parents rely on these ratings in the app stores to inform those decisions about what platforms they want to direct their kids to and also direct their children away from,” he said.

The complaint targets several features that the state says encourage children to repeatedly open the app.

“During this investigation on Snapchat, we found a mountain of evidence indicating that Snapchat knows how addictive its platform is and knows their design successfully causes compulsive behavior,” Sunday said.

Among them are “Snapstreaks,” which track the number of consecutive days that two users exchange messages or photos. A flame icon disappears if users do not maintain the streak.

Sunday said the feature places a perceived value on children’s friendships and capitalizes on their fear of missing out.

“To a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old, social acceptance is everything,” Sunday said. “We allege this streak feature puts a tangible value on friendships and influences a child’s feelings of self-worth.”

In the statement, the spokesperson disputed the claim, stating that Snapchat operates differently from other social media.

“It opens to a camera, not a feed of content, and was built to encourage self-expression and authentic connection with friends,” the spokesperson said.

Disappearing evidence

The attorney general also criticized Snapchat’s “ephemeral” design, under which many photographs and messages disappear after they are viewed or after a set period. Sunday said that feature can give young users a false sense of security and encourage them to share revealing photographs or evidence of risky behavior.

Although a message may disappear from the app, Sunday noted that recipients can preserve it through a screenshot or other means.

“A simple screenshot can turn what they thought was a temporary photo into a permanent nightmare,” he said. “I can’t think of anything more concerning than predators having access to kids in arenas where they feel even more free to act deviantly.”

The lawsuit further alleges that the platform’s “Find Friends” feature “has connected minors with adult strangers seeking to groom, harass, exploit, and even assault them, or to sell them illegal drugs.”

The disappearing messages, Sunday said, create opportunities for predators, cyberbullies and others who believe their conduct will leave no lasting record.

Sunday said the state wants safeguards addressing that feature, as well as changes to Snapchat’s recommendation systems and other design elements that encourage prolonged use.

“We want to make sure that the algorithm itself is either turned off or changed in a way or modified so that children aren’t constantly being pulled into this purposefully designed system to addict them,” Sunday said.

Proposed legislation

Sunday’s recent lawsuits come after a series of discussions with young people across the commonwealth about social media, artificial intelligence and smartphone usage that culminated in the report teenTALK.

Snapchat is used daily by more than half of U.S. teenagers ages 13 to 17, while approximately 13% say they use it “almost constantly,” according to the Pew Research Center.

Sunday also said that the company has only responded to 0.2% of more than 300,000 reports involving self-harm or suicide-related content, an allegation in the complaint that has not been independently verified.

“Snapchat has received complaints and reports, hundreds of thousands of them about harmful features on their app, and they respond to a minuscule fraction of those complaints,” he said.

State Sen. Tracy Pennycuick, a Montgomery County Republican who chairs the Senate Communications and Technology Committee, joined Sunday for the announcement.

She sponsored a resolution establishing a state task force on “Child Protection in the Digital Age,” which Sunday will chair. She has also introduced legislation addressing artificial-intelligence chatbots and AI-generated child sexual abuse material.

“The digital age has created extraordinary opportunities, but it’s also given bad actors and sometimes the platforms themselves unprecedented access to our children,” Pennycuick said. “Technology has changed, the threats have changed, and our laws must change with them.”