A Snapchat feature is feeding teens’ deepest insecurities
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
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