Snapchat has been accused by a Danish research group of deliberately allowing a significant number of drug dealers to operate on the platform, making illegal substances easily accessible to young users.
While the social network has developed technology to filter out drug dealers’ accounts, the research group Digitalt Ansvar has uncovered serious flaws in the moderation of these profiles. The Danish organisation argues that Snapchat’s technology is ineffective at detecting drug-related keywords in users’ account names.
To carry out their investigation, the Digitalt Ansvar team posed as a 13-year-old and found that many users were openly selling drugs, even advertising it in their usernames.
Digitalt Ansvar reported that after just a few hours on the platform, Snapchat had recommended 70 drug-related accounts to them.
Ask Hesby Holm, CEO of Digitalt Ansvar, said: “As a child or young person, you don’t need to search for these profiles yourself; you can have them recommended directly by Snapchat. That is deeply problematic. Snapchat itself says they proactively use technology to filter out profiles that sell drugs on the platform. Our investigation shows this is not true.“
