In Jonathan Haidt’s latest Substack post about Snapchat, he’s sounding the alarm — again.

Mining hundreds of pages of internal content from more than 600 civil lawsuits, Haidt and his partner, Zach Rausch, draw five conclusions. First, Snapchat is designed to keep teens glued to their phones. Second, adolescents can purchase guns and drugs on the app in “under a minute”. Third, the trust‑and‑safety team handles roughly 10,000 sextortion reports every month, and they suspect the real figure is higher. Fourth, the self‑erasing chats nurture cyber‑bullying. Finally, executives knew this yet did nothing. While each point is alarming on its own, most alarming is the evidence of sextortion.

Sextortion, the weaponisation of sexual images and videos to extort a victim, has become one of the most pernicious crimes of the Internet Age. Both adults and minors have been impacted for decades by such online schemes. To illustrate how long this has been happening: when I was in sixth grade, a female classmate of mine became a victim of such a crime.

Since the early 2020s, the risk to minors has exploded. In January 2023 the FBI reported more than 7,000 sextortion cases involving minors in a single year, linking several to adolescent suicides. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received 26,718 sextortion tips in 2023, a 150% jump from 2022.

Sextortion against minors often works like this. A predator impersonates an age‑appropriate romantic interest. The predator then extracts a nude photo and threatens to share it unless the minor pays money or sends more content. Predators often target pubescent boys — according to the FBI, between the ages of 14 and 17 — who may be more susceptible to sexual flattery, less accustomed to the idea they can be manipulated, and more likely to panic. In the case of Snapchat, because messages vanish by default and users are alerted when screenshots are taken, it creates a false sense of security among users. They mistakenly believe that what they’re sending is “safe”, allowing predators to gain leverage.

Haidt’s report suggests that Snap employees didn’t only know this was a problem, but they knew the victims skewed young. Even more troubling is that his report states that Snap’s search‑term tool allowed adults to zero in on minors, an allegation supported by a leaked chat: “Using ‘underage’ just now, there are accounts like ‘These Girls R Underage,’ ‘Underage Nudes,’ and ‘Nude Underage Girls.’ I thought you needed the exact handle to search”. It’s unclear if this transcript means that predators were targeting young people, or if it’s evidence that people were openly trading CSAM (child sexual abuse material) on the app.

Haidt often comes under fire from people who work in technology, report on it, and study its effects. At times, his calls for sweeping limits on social media use, including age-gating, are rather excessive. But with issues like sextortion, it is completely warranted. This is a global problem that exists across nearly all social media platforms, and there is very little public awareness of it.

Sextortion exists along a spectrum. Some of it is financially motivated: an easy way to coerce minors into giving predators money, typically cryptocurrency, which is less easily trackable. Some are more “classical” examples of grooming, that is, a pedophile targeting a minor  for their own twisted sexual gain. And then there are instances of sextortion that are even more sinister than that, true nightmare fuel. The independent researcher Bx has traced one network — 764, which she describes as “satanic accelerationists” — documenting cases that spiral into self‑harm, suicide, and violence, including at least three mass shootings. A joint report from WIRED, The Washington Post, and Der Spiegel followed the same predator ring in 2024. Their reporting also found sextortion, self-harm, suicide, and worse.

The problem is, there are no clear legal solutions. Age-gating, for example, sounds promising in theory but ultimately compromises adult privacy. This only strengthens Haidt’s most controversial proposal: take smartphones away from kids entirely. Everything else — digital literacy, awareness, tougher penalties for negligent corporations — is just a temporary fix. We’ve been asleep at the wheel for too long; maybe the only thing left to do is log off.

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