One of my biggest criticisms of Adolescence, the monster hit and now cultural and political bellwether, is in the show, 13-year-old Jamie Miller is being bullied by his classmates online. I don’t take issue with the bullying part – social media is a crucible of tension and nastiness that often explodes into all kinds of real-life conflict, especially for teenagers. My issue is with the fact the bullying took place on Instagram. Very few 13-year-olds use Instagram much anymore, and Gen A even consider TikTok to be a bit naff and symbolic of Gen Z culture (who they see as a bit culturally over the hill now). Gen A are all about Snapchat, with 84 per cent of them using it daily in the UK and it is their biggest communication platform with each other.
Snapchat is often seen by parents as more benign because it’s not inherently a broadcast-style social media platform like Instagram or TikTok and many view it as a kind of WhatsApp with more emojis. Carol, who has two teen daughters, is typical of many when she says: “I don’t let either of my girls use TikTok and they only watch YouTube – not post. Snapchat is fine because it just allows them to chat to their friends privately in groups.”
The cartoon-like format gives it an innocent glow and the impression that, when controlled, Snapchat can be like a private chat group is misleading. Often Snapchat groups can be sprawling and it’s often difficult to know for sure who’s in the chat. The wildly popular Bitmoji feature means you don’t really know who you are talking to as your identity is hidden behind a customised cartoon feature, all kinds of bullying toxicity happens behind those cute customised cartoons – and a lot of bullying happens on Snapchat.
The tragic suicide of 14-year-old Mia Janin who attended JFS in north London was linked to the hideous bullying she was on the receiving end of by classmates on Snapchat.
Crucially, the messages on Snapchat are also ephemeral and are deleted once viewed. Group chats are deleted after seven days. So, if there is something damning on there, the sender can simply deny it and there’s no remaining evidence unless you’ve screenshotted it.
But if you are subject to a torrent of abuse, which happens frequently to teens, it can be hard and distressing to snapshot everything. Snapchat streaks – a function used to encourage users to send each other at least one picture every 24 hours –are addictive and cause a huge amount of stress, particularly if you are in lots of them. Snapchat also reveals your location if you post a picture and haven't explicitly turned the function off.
However, an interesting, and somewhat worrying, evolution of the app is how it has replaced “soft dating” and IRL flirting. Prior to phones and social media, if you had a crush, you might have hung out at the park in a group and maybe progressed to going to the cinema if things got a bit more serious. But, for many young people Snapchat often is their hangout and naturally this comes with politics and coded behaviours that are everyday lived experience of teens, but hardly known among their parents.
One of the big horrors of modern life for a teenager and particularly if you have sent something meaningful or vulnerable is to be “left on read” – this means that your chat has been read, but left unanswered (the unfilled blue arrow).
For most adults a “read but not responded” is met with a meh, they’re probably busy/will reply later. But for teens, this single hollow blue arrow icon can precipitate a spiral of anxiety where all kinds of awful conclusions are drawn and assumed.
Eye spy trouble: The innocent emoji is torturing an entire generation of teens
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Eye spy trouble: The innocent emoji is torturing an entire generation of teens (Getty)
Jenna, 14: “If friends leave me on read and don’t reply, I immediately panic that they don’t like me or are all talking about me. I have to send another Snap straight away that might interest them more so that they reply.”
Kat, 15: “I’d die if I sent a boy I liked a Snap and he left it on read. Like die. My friend did it to a boy who was popular in the year above and he left it on read and she spiralled. We had to sit up all night with her and talk her down.”
The spiral wasn’t called for – it turned out he was just revising and didn’t have time to reply straight away, so it all worked out in the end, but, says Kat, “that was a bad night. None of us slept”.
Of course, adults reading this will throw their hands up and say lesson learned, time to get a life. We can all sympathise with the plight of the “revising boy”, but young people’s capacity for anxiety over the smallest perceived slights, are a boon for them. They are tuned into their turmoil and know how to feed off it and cash in from it too.
Snapchat had a seemingly clever solution for this, the half-swipe. The half-swipe is when you can literally half-swipe the message, briefly viewing its contents without fully opening it, meaning it’s not put on read and there isn’t the pressure to respond. But the problem is, teens all know about the half-swipe – yet another spiral waiting to happen.
Snapchat is a powerful communication tool – but it’s also a hotbed for all kinds of toxicity
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Snapchat is a powerful communication tool – but it’s also a hotbed for all kinds of toxicity (Getty)
So, Snapchat has come up with another evil genius solution to the half-swipe panic – one that they could monetise and will make their product even more addictive. If you subscribe to Snapchat+ (£3.99 a month) it comes with the “peek a peek” feature that means you can catch someone in the act of half-swiping as the eyeball emoji pops up when they do it. But here’s the catch (or one of many) – you have to catch them act – which means to do so a teen has to be looking at their phone all the time.
Fifteen-year-old Ivan illustrates the problem neatly: “My mate asked this really popular girl out and on Snap and then got obsessed with the idea she might half-swipe him. My dad took us to the football and the tickets were really expensive and we spent the entire match staring at his phone, trying to catch her in the half-swipe!”
Or Ebony, also 15: “Half-swipe is horrible. We have half-swipe sessions where we take shifts to watch someone’s phone if they have sent a Snap they’re worried about. It’s bad for anxiety.”
This all might sound ludicrous to adults; the closest Gen X-ers and Boomers came to this kind of anxiety is the hours spent next to a landline waiting for that call from a special someone. But the worrying development for teens today is how Big Tech can manipulate the anxieties around teen friendship and romance to make their tech more addictive. Not to mention, make money from it.
Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller in ‘Adolescence’, which has taken the world by storm
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Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller in ‘Adolescence’, which has taken the world by storm (Netflix)
Teenagers are missing out on real-life experiences because they now have another reason to stare at a screen every waking hour. The half-swipe tracker has become another reason to take a phone to bed, to school and consume whatever content on there that is being served up.
Meaner teens can make hay from someone’s vulnerability – or worse – with the group or anyone in their contacts. It adds to social media’s complexity too. Emojis mean different things on different platforms, there are a variety of subtle codes, signifiers and behaviours that underscore how online communications can become a social minefield.
And if you were in any doubt how lucrative all this teenage anxiety is? Since the half-swipe tracker function was brought in, the Snapchat+ subscription grew revenue by more than 131 per cent in 2024 bringing in at least $500m. That’s a lot of eyeballs. And internal panic. 👀
You can read more of Chloe Combi’s workhere