MPs are worried Snapchat is becoming ‘addictive’ for young people
Facebook likes, Twitter favourites and Snapchat streaks – all ways to show some cyber-love with your friends on social media. But in a digital age rife with young people feeling pressure to keep up with social trends, MPs are beginning to show concerns over the ‘addictive’ quality of some social apps, particularly Snapchat and its ‘streak’ feature.
Created in 2012, Snapchat now has around 186 million users messaging and sharing photos on the app each day.
The app uses various emojis to represent friendship and frequent messaging on the app, including a smiley face for your ‘Best Friend’ – the person you message the most. The streak, represented by a flame emoji next to a Snapchat friend’s name, has become increasingly popular recently, with users wanting to show off a high streak as a symbol of popularity and communication.
Streaks can be formed on Snapchat if two users message on the app for three days in a row. The streak then increases for every day after, with a special 100 emoji on the 100th day of messages. Some users have streaks into the hundreds, representing two users messaging every day for hundreds of days.
Although often seen as a fun incentive to reach out to friends and stay in contact with them, MPs from the Digital, Culture, Media and Sports committee are exploring the ‘addictive’ nature of social platforms and suggesting that the ‘streak’ feature can become addictive for young people on the app.
But Snapchat’s creative strategy director sees the streak as an additional feature, and not an integral part of the app, suggesting Snapchat isn’t just about a streak.
Nevertheless, it’s thought young people are beginning to feel so much pressure to keep their streaks going that if they can’t access the app, they ask friends to log in to their accounts and message each other, to keep the streaks going. Others have written to Snapchat and demanded their streaks were reinstated if the app went down and messages weren’t being received.
