What Happened When We Created a Snapchat Account for a 13-Year-Old

LOS ANGELES—As Snapchat faces a torrent of civil lawsuits—from grieving parents, school districts, and state attorneys general—over alleged harm to young users, the social media giant has in recent years introduced features meant to protect against dangers such as illicit drug sales and sexploitation.

Several recent studies funded by child safety organizations and conducted after those features were introduced, however, offer a glimpse of what young people are exposed to on the app.

One study by the Heat Initiative found Snapchat recommended 739 “unsafe” videos—including 257 related to drugs and alcohol, and 244 with sexual content—to two 13-year-old avatar accounts across a 12-hour period. It also recommended 419 strangers as friends, including at least six sexual content creators and three people advertising drugs.

Other questionable exposures included violence, criminal activity, disordered eating, self-harm, and suicide.

In another study, researchers polled 1,106 users aged 10 to 17 and found that 56 percent had encountered “unsafe content” or messages in the past year. While the app requires users to be at least 13, anyone can create an account and lie about his or her age.

A third study, published late last month, evaluated the app’s safety features and found that eight out of 11 failed.

This matters, child safety advocates say, because more than half of U.S. teens and, according to Snapchat, around 90 percent of 13- to 24-year-olds worldwide are on the app, known for its ephemeral messaging, AR filters, and live location sharing. 

In an open letter to Heat Initiative and advocacy organization Parents Together Action, Snap Inc. questioned the study’s methodology and warned against what it called a “Sisyphean cycle” of technology panic.

“We caution against drawing sweeping conclusions from a report based on a handful of ‘researcher’-created accounts, rather than a true cold-start experience, and that appears designed to generate alarming headlines rather than provide an objective evaluation of teen safety online,” the company wrote, adding that the research extrapolates its broad claims from “a narrow and unrepresentative sample” while ignoring extensive safeguards.

In particular, Snap suggested that avatar accounts created by researchers put a thumb on the scale by using previously used phones and searching for sensitive topics, then drawing broad conclusions from a “narrow probe” that might reveal “edge-case concerns,” but has little to do with a typical teen experience on the app.

But research conducted by The Epoch Times produced its own results.

Unsolicited Sexual Content

What might a teenage girl encounter when she opens a new Snapchat account?

To find out, we created our own 13-year-old avatar on a clean Android smartphone—a brand-new device with no contacts or other preexisting data.

The only information we provided was a gender (female) and a birthday (fictitious), yet the account was almost immediately served what appeared to be an unsolicited stream of content depicting graphically pantomimed sex acts, sexual violence, and glamorized incest, age-gap sex, and pedophilia. Such content appeared continuously over the course of more than a week.

Many of the videos appeared to feature young girls mugging for the camera, their faces suggestive of simulated sexual acts just out of frame. Some included add captions promoting incest or sex with older men. Others appeared to suggest a prelude to rape, with masked men grabbing women by the ankles.

Then there were the pranks, such as clips that began with a tight close-up of a girl’s face contorted in terror, or a young child’s hands lodged in the crotch of an adult—only to pan out and show a less sinister explanation.

So why was Snapchat’s algorithm serving this type of content to an account registered as a 13-year-old girl?

All such content is prohibited under Snap’s community guidelines, which have even stricter rules for public feeds such as the platform’s Spotlight feature, a vertical short-video feed meant to rival TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.

After reviewing more than 50 screenshots—a modest sampling—of such content flagged by The Epoch Times, the company acknowledged that the videos violate their community guidelines but did not answer questions about why or how the algorithm might curate such a content stream for a 13-year-old.

Snap told us that it removes violative content after investigating—and that it uses such findings to improve its “recommendation systems.”

In conversation, representatives repeatedly questioned whether we had used a “wiped” phone—one that previously hosted other data—or a “clean” one, and said many other factors can influence “signals” from a phone or from “other places,” but did not elaborate or offer examples.

In The Epoch Times’ experiment, the phone was brand new, was not connected to a cellular account, and had no other data aside from a new Gmail account created for the express purpose of opening a Snap account.

According to the company’s stated policies, such content should not exist in a public feed such as Spotlight in the first place, much less at the rate and intensity observed in our experiment.

“We pre-moderate public content before it can be recommended to a broad audience, and proactively find and crack down on public accounts that may try to market inappropriate content to teens,” the company said in a June 10 post announcing upgraded safety features for young users. 

‘I Don’t Think People Know How Bad It Is’

Parents, including those who have lost children to accidental fentanyl poisonings they say are linked to Snapchat, argue that a reckoning over youth safety is long overdue.

“I’m trying to check my anger,” Jaime Puerta, a parent-advocate, told The Epoch Times when asked about Snap’s new safety features. 

“I’ve been at this since 2021, dealing with Snapchat’s boilerplate responses to this crisis. And every single response is negligible,” said Puerta, who runs Victims of Illicit Drugs, an educational and advocacy organization.

In Puerta’s view, the company’s inaction “equates to thousands upon thousands of more children dying.” 

“They have known about this problem since at least 2017,” he said.

In April 2020, as both the COVID-19 pandemic and a national fentanyl epidemic were beginning to crest, Puerta found his 16-year-old son, Daniel, unresponsive in his room.

On Daniel’s dresser, Puerta found the remaining half of a blue pill that looked exactly like a pharmaceutical-grade oxycodone—but which he would later discover was illicit fentanyl, made to look like a prescription opioid.

“I think people don’t know how bad it is,” said Sam Chapman, a prominent advocate for legislative reform. Along with Puerta, Chapman is among more than 60 families suing Snap in Los Angeles Superior Court for wrongful death and product liability claims.

According to Chapman, his son Sammy died from fentanyl poisoning in 2021 after purchasing a counterfeit pill from a dealer who had contacted him on Snapchat, and then delivered the deadly dose to him “like a pizza.” He was 16.

“Everything Snap has done is a PR stunt. … None of the fixes are real,” Chapman told The Epoch Times.

For example, he argues that the company’s new restriction on adding friends—users must either have that person in their phone contacts or have friends in common—does little to stop dealers and other predators from accessing children.

“Here I am, I want to get into my son’s school. I’m a criminal, right? I can’t network with all of those kids because of the new rule,” Chapman said. 

“But as soon as I get one, I can network to all the rest of them because I’m through the gate that Snapchat established. So it’s one keystroke away. That’s how much they delayed the criminal.

“You can just get every 15-year-old in the world like that.”

After users are connected, they can see each other’s precise location via a live map, which Chapman calls “the most dangerous feature of all.”

Recent “fixes,” he said, are no match for digital-native adolescents, and safety measures often don’t work to begin with, are poorly understood, or unused by parents.

“Anyone who turns on Snap and opens an account, you can say you’re as young as you want, and you will get that trash sent to you on day one,” Chapman said.

The Tylenol Precedent

Snap says it has taken a multilayered approach to the fentanyl crisis, including search suppression, awareness campaigns, investments in law enforcement capabilities, and artificial intelligence tools that remove 90 percent of illegal drug content before users ever report it.

Paul DelPonte, executive director of the National Crime Prevention Council, argues the risks cannot be solved by adding safety features, which he likens to putting an airbag in a faulty car.

“The platforms need to fundamentally revamp and redesign dangerous flaws in their algorithmic generation, as well as other platform features,” he told The Epoch Times.

The council’s mascot, McGruff the crime dog, has a presence across social media, he said—everywhere except Snapchat.

“We do not even go on Snapchat because it’s so dangerous,” he said. “Also, the platform isn’t conducive to public education.”

The council estimates that 70 percent of teen drug deaths in the country involve fentanyl, and that eight out of 10 lethal fake pills are sold through social media platforms, with Snapchat being among the most frequently cited.

That 80 percent estimate is based on 2025 data, from a variety of federal government reports, as well as interviews with people responsible for compiling them, DelPonte said.

Drug overdose deaths have been declining among all age groups since 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including a 37 percent drop among 15- to 24-year-olds. 

DelPonte attributes this not to any new safety features, but rather to a number of external reasons—the widespread distribution of naloxone, a federal crackdown, and internecine cartel wars, among other factors.

Looking at the CDC numbers, he said, one could extrapolate that teen overdose deaths with some connection to social media, and especially Snapchat, may be in the “tens of thousands—which is mind-blowing.”

DelPonte said it remains a straightforward product liability issue that should be treated with the same urgency and demand for accountability as historical crises that led to reform, such as the Tylenol poisoning scare of the 1980s. 

In that incident, “people were mysteriously dying. … Johnson and Johnson immediately issued a national recall and shut down manufacturing until they figured out what was going on. They didn’t even know if it was their fault at this point,” he said.

A total of seven people died from what turned out to be potassium cyanide placed into bottles of Tylenol by an unknown individual.

“You know those safety seals you get around everything you buy now that you consume? That’s how they started. The company took responsibility,” DelPonte said. “In this case, with social media companies, they’re spending a vast amount of money on lobbying and litigation to avoid any accountability.”

Built Differently

In its June 29 response to Heat Initiative’s report, Snap suggested that most examples of “unsafe content” violate its community guidelines, but stressed that “risk” is not synonymous with “harm”—not all exposures warrant the same response.

“When such broad content categories are collapsed into a single headline, the result is more clutter than clarity,” Snap said. “It may be designed to generate attention, but it does not help parents, policymakers, or platforms understand relative severity, pathways of exposure, or which interventions are most likely to reduce potential harm.”

Snap maintains that its app was “built differently”—opening directly to the camera rather than to a feed. That and other key safety features, the company suggests, are “meaningful architectural choices” that set it apart from competitors.

But the app’s “Stories” and “Spotlight” feeds are a single click away.

To remain competitive in a cutthroat marketplace, all the major apps have incorporated some version of these short, vertical feeds, which some experts contend can be especially addictive and damaging to adolescent brains.

“They’re trying to move into the TikTok feed [model] with Spotlight,” said Marc Berkman, CEO of the nonprofit Organization for Social Media Safety. 

Berkman said he believes “Snap really facilitates the severe, acute harms, but also the repetitive harms, of engagement maximizing.”

The company’s response to recent research, Berkman said, doesn’t answer the most important questions: “’Is dangerous content for tweens and teens flowing?’ Yes. ‘And are they preventing it?’ No.”

Across social media, Berkman said research shows the number of children being harmed by the kinds of content and contact highlighted in the Heat Initiative reports—cyberbullying, sexting, violence—are in the millions. 

“There’s definitive proof it’s very dangerous,” Berkman said. 

The burden, he said, should be on Snap to prove that its product is safe—not on researchers to prove that it isn’t. 

With U.S. teens spending, by some counts, an average of five hours per day on social media, the problem is compounding, Berkman said.

“If there’s something bad and it’s isolated, OK. But something bad, five hours a day every day of the year, becomes catastrophic. There’s no recognition of that,” he said.

Public Opinion

Parents who attribute their child’s death to social media harms describe Snap as presenting a troubling mix of addiction and real world danger.

“It’s the ephemeral messaging. It’s the fact that strangers have access to our kids. It’s the addictive algorithmic features—all of that is bad and scary,” said Amy Neville, a bellwether plaintiff in the wrongful death suit against Snap.

“They train your kid to show up to their platform every single day by rewarding them—by the gamification that gets the dopamine hit, that gets these kids to keep coming back for more and more,” said Neville, who lost her son, Alexander, at the age of 14 to fentanyl poisoning in 2020.

Neville is optimistic that people are slowly awakening to the issue and that public opinion, informed by emerging research and trials, will play a deciding factor.

“Parents were so harshly judged—‘You should’ve taken the phone away. Of course, your kid’s dead, you gave him too much access.’ I’ve heard it all. But once the verdict came out, there was a shift,” she said.

In March, a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and Google to pay $6 million, in the first bellwether trial on social media addiction.

After that verdict, Neville said, “people were coming to our defense.”

She acknowledges that, among the many civil lawsuits currently winding their way through the courts, the wrongful death claims against Snap have “the longest shot” because of a vestigial stigma surrounding drug use.

But she is hopeful a different narrative will emerge—not just of the fraught reality that children go online to buy drugs these days, but of the engineered environment in which they do it.

Thus far, Snap has resolved several high-profile cases through settlement rather than proceeding to trial, including most recently in a social media addiction trial in Los Angeles Superior Court.

“If people keep settling and we don’t get Snapchat in court, we’re not going to get to really see where the public is. I want the public to know—more than anything—that this is real and that there are things we can do about it,” Neville said.

“There are ways we can take back power from these companies.”