Snapchat has had its fair share of sex scandals from sexting to harassment. But a new lawsuit against the ephemeral messaging app claims the service bombards young users with sexually explicit content from popular media organizations.
According to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the 14-year-old plaintiff, who is referred to as John Doe, was terrorized by phallic references in Snapchat stories from the app’s media partners.
The lawsuit described a Buzzfeed listicle using Disney characters from teen Doe’s favorite childhood movies to illustrate oral sex acts as “perverted.”
“Innocent pictures from John’s favorite Disney movies were perverted into obscene sexual images and text,” the complaint states. “The compilation of Disney images John accessed included pornographic text and innuendo next to the photographs. In fact, the photographic compilation was called: ’23 Pictures That Are Too Real If You’ve Ever had Sex With A Penis.’”
The suit enumerates articles the Los Angeles teen found using the app’s Discover feature, such as “14 Sex Problems Only Lesbians Understand,” accompanied by a picture of scissors, “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Penis Tattoos,” with a picture of a tattooed banana, and “Beware of Whiskey Dick” illustrated with a naked woman inside a penis-shaped rocket, the lawsuit states. Other articles flagged as inappropriate by the complainant were “People Tell Us Their Weirdest Stoner Snacks” and “14 Drunk Convos Every Woman Has Had.”
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The lawsuit calls out Buzzfeed, Vice, the Daily Mail, MTV, and other media outlets as exhibiting “a clear pattern and practice of curating the Discover page with articles that emphasize hardcore sex and sexual themes and liberality of drug use” in their Snapchat content. Media organizations are not named as defendants in the suit but are categorized as complicit for pushing explicit content on a platform that is widely used by minors.
Snapchat has become one the fastest growing social media platforms. The app recently surpassed Twitter’s user numbers, with at least 150 million people using the service every day. Snapchat also bested Instagram and all other social media competitors among teenage users. Nearly a third of teenagers, or 28 percent, use Snapchat compared to 17 percent who use Facebook, according to an investment firm’s study.
With its continued success, Snapchat has been aggressively recruiting advertisers and media publishers, even updating features to make the platform experience less raw and more enticing to users and third parties. But the youth are Snapchat’s bread and butter and media partners, which often have designated teams for just for the app’s content, are likely going to have fine-tune their content to be more G-rated.