Snapchat has changed the friend recommendation system on its site. Now minors will not be able to see adult strangers in the recommendations field. Both users must have enough friends in common to be displayed. Adult users will also not be recommended random children and teenagers.
Late last year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that more than 100,000 people died from fentanyl overdoses in 2021. The list of victims includes a large number of teenagers, and the social network Snapchat is used by dealers to sell illegal substances and find new customers.
As a result, Snapchat has taken new security measures. The company is now partnering with the US Anti-Drug Coalition Community and the nonprofit Truth Initiative to help produce a fentanyl video series. The videos will be distributed through the Snapchat Discover platform.
The company also improved machine learning technologies that help detect drug-promoting posts on Snapchat. The company said that the algorithms manage to find 88% of prohibited content. For a quick response, the company increased its law enforcement task force by 74%. Now the response time has been reduced by 85%.
Snapchat analysts noticed that last year, more than 23% of all complaints about the promotion of illegal substances were reports of drug sales. Now this figure has been reduced to 16%. Separately, it was noted that dealers are trying to bypass the protection and come up with new code words to designate various drugs. The research team is constantly updating the list of stop words with slang expressions used in the adolescent environment.
Changes also affected the recommender system. Dealers often sought out new underage customers using Snapchat's recommender system. Now the system is built in such a way that adult users will not be able to see teenagers and children in the recommendation block. The innovation also works in the opposite direction - a minor user will not be able to find adult strangers in the recommendations. Exceptions apply only when users have a certain number of mutual friends.
bbabo.Net