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Snapchat is a fun social media app that is very popular, especially with young people. While you can use it to communicate in a variety of ways with your friends, there are some bad uses for it as well. AJ Dwyer give us some good and bad things that can happen while using Snapchat to help you decide if you should delete the app or not.
Easy and Fun Way to Send Pictures
Snapchat is one of the easiest and funnest way to send pictures to your friends. Through the use of filters, you can make your face look like a silly animal, put the time and date on your picture, or even put the score of a sporting event on a picture while you’re sitting in the stands. Snapchat helps to show your friends what you are experiencing and how you are feeling in every picture you send.
Bad Pictures Can Be Sent Too
The downside to Snapchat is that people can send you lewd and offensive pictures as well. These pictures will only appear for one to ten seconds and you can only replay them once. If you want to save and report a picture, you have to screenshot it, which will automatically let the person who sent it know you saved it.
Main Form of Communication
For young people, Snapchat has become the main form of communication. Invitations to parties and spontaneous hangouts are now mostly communicated to friends through messages, pictures, and stories on Snapchat. If you don’t have Snapchat, you could miss out on all kinds of events happening with your friends.
Company Stories Can Have Bad Content
There are many companies that put up something new on their story every day. This includes companies like ESPN, some television networks, or even magazines. Some other companies will put up half naked woman, or sometimes more sexually exposed woman, on their stories that anyone can see. This is something that young boys should not be looking at and could lead them to seek out other forms of pornography.
As you can see, there are many good and bad things about having Snapchat on your phone. The question you need to answer for yourself is does the good outweigh the bad. It’s up to you, but you need to decide if you should delete Snapchat.
Discussion Questions:
- Watch the video together or invite someone to summarize the topic.
- What is your initial reaction to this video? Do you disagree with any of it? What jumped out at you?
- What main form of social media do you use? Why do you use it? How do you use it?
- What is your favorite thing about Snapchat? What is your favorite picture filter?
- When has someone sent you some kind of offensive picture? What did you do about it? Are you still friends with that person on Snapchat? Why or why not?
- When have you missed out on an invite with your friends because you didn’t see it on social media?
- Have you accidentally seen some form of pornography on social media? How easy do you think it would be for a young man to find pornography on social media?
- When have you deleted or taken a break from some kind of social media? Why did you delete or take a break from it?
- Write a personal action step based on this conversation.
