By Julie Jargon
A Snapchat feature lets paying users see their position in their friends' digital orbits. For some teens, whose friends are everything, it's adding to their anxiety.
Snapchat+ is the app's $4-a-month subscription service. Subscribers can check where they rank with a particular friend based on how often that friend communicates with them. The result is automatically rendered in a solar-system metaphor: Are you Mercury, the planet closest to your friend? Great! Uranus? Bad sign.
"A lot of kids my age have trouble differentiating best friends on Snapchat from actual best friends in real life," says Callie Schietinger, a 15-year-old in Yorktown, N.Y.
She said she had her own problems when a boyfriend noticed that he was Neptune in her solar system. He asked who held the Mercury position and when she told him it was a guy friend, he got mad.
More than 20 million U.S. teens use the app, though most don't pay for Snapchat+. The young adults I spoke to with those paid accounts said they've seen friendships splinter and young love wither due to the knowledge that someone else ranks higher on the app. Some say teens have signed up for Snapchat+ just to check their status with a crush.
Like other social-media features, Snapchat's solar system was created to get people to engage more with the app. And while it can be turned off, it's on by default. Now, lawmakers, doctors and parents are giving fuller attention to these apps and how they broadly affect kids' mental health. New legislation and lawsuits have pressed tech companies to better protect minors on social media, if not block them from it outright.
Callie and her boyfriend have since broken up, for other reasons. But that stress and the misunderstandings she has seen other friends experience have soured her on the feature. She says she won't renew her Snapchat+ subscription when it expires in May.
"It's everyone's biggest fear put onto an app," Callie says. "Ranking is never good for anyone's head."
'Buried in those devices'
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory last June on the effects of social media on youth mental health. Adolescents are susceptible to peer pressure, opinions and comparison, he said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill earlier this week that, if upheld, would prohibit kids under the age of 14 from having social-media accounts. He explained, "Being buried in those devices all day is not the best way to grow up."
And on Thursday, four school boards in major cities in Canada sued the owners of Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok for about $3 billion, alleging the platforms have contributed to a mental-health crisis and left schools to clean up the mess. About 200 U.S. school districts have also joined litigation against social-media companies.
The social hierarchy that's playing out on Snapchat has parents vexed. "You have to wonder if all this fear of being left out is part of the mental-health problems kids are facing," says Callie's mother, Erica Bates.
A Snap spokeswoman says the friend solar system is one of more than 30 features on Snapchat+. Most are intended to help users customize the app, and all can be easily turned off. A friend's solar-system ranking isn't visible to others -- users can only see their position in relation to a friend, and can't see who is closer or farther away. Snapchat+ subscribers can pin friends they want to appear closer.
The company has no plans to turn off the feature, but the spokeswoman says it is always open to feedback. "We always prioritize our community's well-being," she says, adding that the majority of the seven million Snapchat+ subscribers worldwide are over 18.
'Do we really need external validation?'
Even without Snapchat+, the app can show teens where they stand with friends via emojis. This occurs if two people are on each other's private eight-person best-friend lists.
A yellow heart indicates "Besties" status -- these two have sent the most snaps to each other. If they're besties for at least two consecutive months, they graduate to "Super BFF," indicated by two red hearts.
Maximilian Milovidov, a 17-year-old in London and a youth digital-safety advocate, says his friends often use the old-fashioned approach: swapping phones and peeking at the activity in each other's social-media accounts.
Maximilian says his feelings have been hurt when he's discovered that he's lower on a friend's list than he thinks he should be. This has discouraged him from getting Snapchat+. The ability to get more granular information about his social standing would only create more anxiety, he says.
"Me and my best friend recently got 'Besties' status on Snapchat and we celebrated," he says. "But then we were like, 'Do we really need that external validation from a platform to tell us we're best friends?'"
Isabelle da Costa, a 20-year-old college student in Atlanta, says Snapchat's solar system reminds her of the app's old days, when anyone could see who their friends' top three friends were -- and whether they made the list. Isabelle says she saw many relationships implode over that publicly visible disclosure. Snap ended it in 2015.
That said, she credits her current relationship to Snapchat's friend rankings. In early 2020, she messaged a boy she was interested in, starting with a flirty remark about their "bestie" standing. The romance has already lasted four years.
While it worked out for her, she says the ability for teens to see where they stand with others is usually not constructive.
"There's something about the teenage brain that thrives on drama," Isabelle says, "and Snapchat facilitates it well."
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Write to Julie Jargon at Julie.Jargon@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 30, 2024 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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