When she was 16, Jasmine* wasn’t too fussed about Snapchat, the brand new social media app which, at the time, was all the rage.All her friends were signing up, and she had the same prickly fear-of-missing-out as she had had before joining Facebook when she was 12.Jasmine, now in her 20s, tells Metro that her teachers were clued up enough about Facebook to warn of its dangers back then.
New-fangled Snapchat? Not so much.‘FOMO is the biggest thing when you’re young,’ she says.‘I can’t come into school and hear, “Did you see what Charlotte posted?” Everyone saw it, so I need to see it, too.’ Media on Snapchat has a very short lifespan – messages and photos disappear within 24 hours.
Unless you took a screenshot, that is – something that Jasmine soon came to realise her boyfriend did many times.Jasmine met her partner on the app when she was 16 and rarely spoke with him via any other platform, which made every text they typed and photo sent feel temporary.‘You could write the most abusive message in the world, and you send it on Snapchat,’ she says.
‘Well, I’ve got no evidence of that occurring.’ Trending Now Missing teenager found in Ecuador 'after being trafficked from the UK' World 4 hours ago By Natalie Penza Banker held in Putney Pusher case re-arrested after discovery at his home British Charlie Kirk wannabe beaten up debating people in Manchester British pensioners reveal what really happened in altercation with Russian warship ‘Who else has my Instagram? Who else has these images?’ When the pair broke up after Jasmine turned 18, she was shocked to discover that her ex had been using a joint dating app to send people her explicit images, ones he had coerced her into sending over Snapchat.She only realised this after one of the dates reached out to her on Instagram, worried that ‘something was off’ with all the images he had been sent of her.‘I didn’t remember these images existed.
Why is it even here? Why is there a Snapchat filter on it? What is going on?’ Jasmine says.‘Who else has my Instagram? Who else has these images? Who else has my Snapchat? Who has my number?’ Even though Snapchat tells users when the person they’re conversing with has taken a screenshot, Jasmine had no idea her pictures were then being shared with people she didn’t know.Her ex began to harass Jasmine as he found new ways to get in touch with her and threatened to share more pictures of her taken when she was underage.
The nonconsensual sharing of sexually explicit images, sometimes called nonconsensual porn or ‘revenge porn’, is a criminal offence in the UK.Snapchat prohibits sharing nude or sexually explicit images of anyone under 18, something which is also banned by UK law.Jasmine reported her ex to the police and he was arrested.
But prosecutors said that unless Jasmine testified in court, something she said would have been too traumatising, she didn’t have much of a case.The experience took a toll on Jasmine, who suffered from depression for years.She has since recovered and works with the children’s charity, the NSPCC, to share her experience and promote online child safety.
But Jasmine feels that the government’s announcement on Monday of a ban on social media – Snapchat included – for under-16s isn’t the answer.If the ban had been in place when she was a teen, Jasmine doubts it would have stopped her ex from leaking her image and says that if it weren’t Snapchat, which has tightened its guidelines around sexual content, it would have been something else.‘If we didn’t have social media, we would have found a more dangerous way of doing things,’ she says, mentioning a shady, unregulated part of the internet called the dark web.
Outside, teens have even fewer options as two-thirds of council youth centres and some 800 playgrounds have closed in the last 10 years, while dozens of shops shut every day.Teens told of the ban have half-joked that they’ll just stare at walls all day long once social media becomes inaccessible to them.Jasmine even misses the days of PictoChat, the Nintendo DS’s messaging service, and Club Penguin, a now-defunct online community where people played games and chatted via penguin avatars.
Neither might sound like much, but Jasmine says they were ‘little safe boxes’ she used to hang out at after school.Experts call these a ‘third place’ – not quite a bedroom, not quite a school or workplace.‘Creating spaces which are safe is what we should be doing, not taking away things,’ Jasmine says ‘We could put more money into things like reverse image searching – if that was around when it happened to me, I could have used it.
‘That would have taken away all that fear of walking down the street and thinking, who has these images of me? Then maybe I would have felt braver to pursue a case.’ The NSPCC revealed earlier this year that Snapchat can be used as a ‘loophole’ for child sex abuse.Of the nearly 39,000 child sex abuse image crimes recorded last year, 7,300 cases took place on a social media platform.About 50% of those were on Snapchat, the NSPCC found.
Snapchat removes child sex abuse imagery and reports it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, an American non-profit.If the image was voluntarily self-created by a Snapchat user, the content is removed and the user receives a warning to educate them.NSPCC CEO Chris Sherwood says that he hopes the government’s social media ban will help stop this.
‘The government must continue to put pressure on Big Tech and not let them off the hook,’ Sherwood adds.Trending Now Missing teenager found in Ecuador 'after being trafficked from the UK' World 4 hours ago By Natalie Penza Banker held in Putney Pusher case re-arrested after discovery at his home British Charlie Kirk wannabe beaten up debating people in Manchester British pensioners reveal what really happened in altercation with Russian warship Yet what worries education experts like Sophie Stocks is what will happen when children are reunited with the online world.‘Playing whack-a-mole with individual tools and sites is not an effective way of trying to address the problem,’ the vice president of education and wellbeing at the digital safety technology Smoothwall says.
‘Technology is the future and young people need to learn how to use it responsibly, not have their access blocked.’ How did Snapchat reply? Snap, which owns Snapchat, told Metro: ‘Sexual exploitation of young people is an abhorrent crime, and we are committed to combating it.‘We want to help protect all members of our community from the potentially devastating consequences of their nude content falling into the wrong hands.‘We prohibit sharing nude or sexually explicit images of anyone under 18, and tell our users never to send or save even their own sensitive images.’ On Snapchat being one of the social media apps the government intends to ban for minors, it added: ‘We share the government’s objective of protecting young people from online harm.
‘However, because the majority of time spent on Snapchat is in private messaging between friends and family, an outright ban that disconnects teens from those relationships doesn’t make them safer – it may simply push them to less safe platforms.’ *Name has been changed to protect her anonymity.Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected] more stories like this, check our news page.
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