Transparency Report

January 1, 2020 – June 30, 2020

Released: December 18, 2020

Updated: December 18, 2020

At Snap, we contribute to human progress by empowering people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. We care deeply about the wellbeing of our community and, when building products, we consider the privacy and safety of Snapchatters on the front-end of the design process.

We have clear and thorough guidelines that support our mission by fostering the broadest range of self-expression while encouraging Snapchatters to use our services safely every day. Our Community Guidelines prohibit the spread of false information that can cause harm, hate speech, bullying, harassment, illegal activities, sexually explicit content, graphic violence, and much more.

Our Transparency Report offers important insight into the violating content we enforce against, governmental requests for Snapchatters’ account information, and other legal notifications.

For more information about our approach to and resources for safety and privacy, please take a look at our About Transparency Reporting tab at the bottom of the page.

Account / Content Violations

More than four billion Snaps are created each day using our camera. From January 1, 2020 - June 30, 2020, we enforced against 3,872,218 pieces of content, globally, for violations of our Community Guidelines—which amounts to less than 0.012% of all Story postings. Our teams generally take action on such violations quickly, whether it is to remove Snaps, delete accounts, report information to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), or escalate to law enforcement. In the vast majority of cases, we enforce against content within 2 hours of receiving an in-app report.

Total Content Reports*	Total Content Enforced	Total Unique Accounts Enforced
13,204,971	3,872,218	1,578,985

H1'20: Content Enforced

Chart Key	Reason	Content Reports*	Content Enforced	Unique Accounts Enforced	Turnaround Time**
1	Harassment and Bullying	857,493	175,815	145,445	0.4
2	Hate Speech	229,375	31,041	26,857	0.6
3	Impersonation	1,459,467	22,435	21,510	0.1
4	Regulated Goods	520,426	234,527	137,721	0.3
5	Sexually Explicit Content	8,522,585	3,119,948	1,160,881	0.2
6	Spam	552,733	104,523	59,131	0.2
7	Threatening / Violence / Harm	1,062,892	183,929	141,314	0.5

*The Content Reports reflect alleged violations via our in-app and support inquiries.

**Turnaround Time reflects the median time in hours to action on a user report.

Expanded Violations

Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

The exploitation of any member of our community—particularly young people—is totally unacceptable, and prohibited on Snapchat. Preventing, detecting and eliminating abuse on our platform is a priority for us, and we are constantly improving our capabilities for combating this type of illegal activity.

Reports of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) are quickly reviewed by our Trust and Safety team, and evidence of this activity results in account termination and reporting to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). We provide around-the-clock support to international law enforcement agencies who contact us for assistance with cases involving missing or endangered juveniles.

We use PhotoDNA technology to proactively identify and report the uploading of known imagery of child sexual exploitation and abuse, and we report any instances to the authorities. Of the total accounts enforced against for Community Guidelines violations, we removed 2.99% for CSAM takedown.

Moreover, Snap proactively deleted 70% of these.

Total Account Deletions	47,136

Terrorism

Terrorist organizations and hate groups are prohibited from Snapchat and we have no tolerance for content that advocates or advances violent extremism or terrorism.

Total Account Deletions	<10

Country Overview

This section gives an overview of the enforcement of our rules in a sampling of individual countries. Our Community Guidelines apply to all content on Snapchat—and all Snapchatters—across the globe, regardless of location.

Information for all other countries is available for download via the attached CSV file.