- The National Center on Sexual Exploitation accused Snapchat and Teen Vogue of encouraging teens to create child pornography by sexting during the coronavirus pandemic.
- The center is urging Teen Vogue and Snapchat to stop using their platforms to endanger children.
- “Snapchat and Teen Vogue are playing right into sexual predators’ hands,” said National Center on Sexual Exploitation executive director Dawn Hawkins.
The center, which fights child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking and the public health harms of pornography urged Teen Vogue on Wednesday to stop encouraging teens “to create child sexual abuse material (child pornography) by sexting during quarantine.”
The group is also pressing Snapchat to stop promoting Teen Vogue’s messages through Snapchat’s Discover feature, which offers news and video content. The social media app, which is popular among teenagers, boasted 218 million daily active users worldwide as of the fourth quarter of 2019. Nearly half of those users who watch the Discover feature watch it daily.
“Snapchat and Teen Vogue are playing right into sexual predators’ hands,” said National Center on Sexual Exploitation executive director and senior vice president Dawn Hawkins in a statement.
She added: “With the likely surge of young viewers on Snapchat due to quarantine, it is socially irresponsible for Snapchat Discover to encourage minors to self-produce underage pornography (i.e. child sexual abuse materials), thereby increasing their vulnerability to sexual predators.”
NCSE noted that encouraging teenagers to sext is encouraging minors to create and distribute child pornography, also called child sex abuse material.
“Online predators use social media platforms to pose as peers and groom children to send them sexually explicit material (i.e. ‘sext’ with them) that they can then distribute and/or use to blackmail the child into other forms of sexual exploitation,” NCSE said.
“What Teen Vogue is doing by promoting sexing to teens is insidious and harmful,” Hawkins told the DCNF. “Given what we know about the brain development of adolescents, it is clear that discussing ‘the importance of consent’ while promoting sexting for minors does not protect those minors from the dangers of sexting — even coerced sexting. The law generally does not recognize minors’ ability to consent.”
NSCE references several examples of Teen Vogue encouraging teenagers to sext during the quarantine through photos provided to the DCNF.
“Like anything worth doing, sexting takes practice,” says a Monday Teen Vogue story on the Snapchat Discover page. “Here are 7 things you might not have known about sexting.”
“Sexting should make you feel good,” a Monday Teen Vogue Discover story said.
Another read: “Sending someone details about what you want to do to them and getting back even more detail about what they want to do to you should be fun, easy, and ultimately joyful. Anything less than that isn’t worth your time.”
