The timing here is almost comically transparent. Two days after Snapchat settled a lawsuit about social media addiction and mental health harm, they suddenly care a whole lot more about helping parents monitor their teens. Snap just announced a bunch of new features for Family Center, their parental control dashboard, and if you believe this is purely about user safety, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Parents can now peek at how much time their kids are burning on Snapchat each day, averaged over a week. The breakdown gets granular too: chatting, snapping, camera creation, Snap Map stalking, and endless scrolling through Spotlight and Stories. It’s the kind of detailed data that would’ve been nice, oh I don’t know, years ago when teens first started showing signs of platform dependency.
The Friend Connection Feature Nobody Asked For
The other big addition lets parents see how their teen supposedly knows new friends they add. Mutual friends, saved contacts, shared communities. Snap frames this as “trust signals” that make it easier for parents to verify their kid is talking to real people and not random creepers.
Look, I get the Technology angle here. Understanding connection context matters. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: this feature exists because Snap knows their platform has been used to facilitate dangerous situations. They’re not being proactive. They’re covering their ass with features that sound protective in a press release.
Family Center itself launched back in 2022, which tells you everything about how serious these companies take child safety. They only build these tools when regulators start breathing down their necks or lawsuits start piling up. Since then, Snap has tacked on more features like seeing recent interactions, setting time limits, and blocking access to their AI chatbot.
The Lawsuit That Changed Everything (Maybe)
The settlement this week involved a 19-year-old identified as K.G.M. who accused Snap and other social media giants of designing features specifically to fuel addiction and trash mental health. Meta, YouTube, and TikTok are still facing the music, with jury selection starting soon. Those companies must be watching Snap’s playbook very carefully right now.
What really stings is that internal documents from ongoing cases show Snap employees flagged concerns about teen mental health nine years ago. Nine years. Snap claims those examples were “cherry-picked” and taken out of context, which is corporate speak for “please don’t look too closely at what we knew and when we knew it.”
The company is still a defendant in other addiction lawsuits, so this settlement doesn’t make everything go away. It just makes one problem slightly smaller while they deal with the others lined up behind it.
Parents now have more visibility, sure. But these tools wouldn’t exist without legal pressure and public outrage. When a company only acts after getting sued, can we really call it innovation or just expensive damage control dressed up in a blog post?