Snapchat’s worst feature is turning Gen Z into narcissistic, paranoid stalkers

All eyes are on the social media giants at the moment. With Instagram’s minimisation of political content, Facebook’s step away from news and TikTok facing a possible ban in the US, the digital triumvirate has been making global headlines for months now.

Yet amid all this noise, another platform used by nearly a third of Australians is flying under the radar: Snapchat.

The Snap Map allows you to see where your friends are whenever they post.

A younger sibling to behemoths like Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat boasts over 8 million Australian users. According to its own user data, 80 per cent of Australians aged between 13 and 24 are on the platform, and they open the app an average of 40 times a day.

But to a huge number of Australians, Snapchat remains relatively unknown, despite being around since 2012. For those unfamiliar, it’s an instant messaging app that deletes communications after 24 hours unless they are saved. Users send “snaps” (often selfies) either to individual users or to their entire following. A “best friends” list ranks the eight people with whom you communicate most, and if you opt in, a “Snap Map” displays the location at which you were last active.

I’ve grown up with Snapchat. I know its influence, aimed at younger users, to be both toxic and underreported.

In my adolescence, I saw the platform encourage vanity and promote a raft of social pressures. I noticed the strains and anxieties this caused, both in myself and in friends. Remarkably, though, and unlike its competitors, Snapchat is rarely pinned as a driving enabler of these issues, even though the app’s culpability is undeniable.

Take, for example, the Snap Map. For many kids, having their locations displayed creates a pressure to socialise. They might not want to be seen alone on a Saturday night or at home when others are spending time together, and so social activity turns from recreation to necessity under this level of scrutiny.

The ability to see if your friends are together and socialising without you has the power to drive insecurities and comparison culture. It is also exhausting. Young people look at the Snap Map to see who’s at a party before deciding whether to go, to see who’s down the street before picking their outfit. Sure, some users don’t display their location or access the feature. But from my experience the vast majority do, including kids in their formative and most vulnerable years.

The Snap Map also normalises knowing, or at the very least feeling entitled to know, where people are at all times. By turning this into a pedestrian assumption – encapsulated well in the casual incredulousness of the common question, “Why is your Snap Map off?” – worrying similarities with stalking behaviours can appear. In a person’s formative years, especially in intimate relationships, this can quickly lead to serious problems; cases of teenage domestic violence and coercive control often involve young women sharing their locations with their boyfriends.

Snapchat’s emphasis on sending snaps is another pernicious feature of the platform. Addiction is one concern here – billions of snaps are sent on the app each day – but more dangerous is the superficial culture this creates.

When you open Snapchat, you are greeted by the front camera (that is, the selfie camera), your face immediately on display. And, in sending snaps to your friends, you come to see and photograph yourself constantly. Streaks – the tally of how many days you’ve kept in contact with someone – turn snaps into a daily obligation.

All this means that my generation is relentlessly presented with its own physical reflection, that we study our image more often than any other cohort in history. The consequence of seeing our own faces thousands of times a week is a persistent, pervasive emphasis on appearance.

No wonder kids are asking Santa for make-up rather than toys. No wonder lip fillers, weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and “baby Botox” are on so in demand. No wonder an approximate third of adolescents engage in disordered eating behaviours within any given year. These snaps and streaks fuel our widespread and vapid obsession with how we look.

Snapchat proves right the saying “the inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart”.

Sure, the platform has its positives. It’s a quick, easy and relatively secure way to communicate, and for older users its dangers can be less powerful. Yet with Gen Z constantly on the app, the insidious influences are freely affecting some of society’s most vulnerable members.

Unlike the US government’s approach to TikTok, I don’t think the solution is a blanket ban. This might be effective in the case of the Snap Map, a manifestly problematic feature. Yet for the rest of the app, the best fix is simpler: we, the users, need to turn to other platforms to keep in touch with friends. Fortunately, plenty of viable options already exist that don’t provide the dopamine rush of likes and streaks.

As of this morning, I’ve deleted Snapchat. To my friends who are wondering where I am on a Saturday night: you’ll just have to call or message me to find out. I suspect I might be sitting on the couch, fear-free.

Daniel Cash is a law student at ANU.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.