Snapchat's Progress Successfully Stops Drug Trafficking On Social Media

Snapchat faces a tough challenge cracking down on drug sales on its social media. (photo: doc. snapchat)

JAKARTA - In recent years, Snapchat has faced a tough challenge to crack down on the sale of illegal drugs on its social media, now the effort is making rapid progress.

Earlier in October last year, NBC News in its investigation reported that a number of young people aged 13 to 23 died after buying pills containing fentanyl on Snapchat.

Seeing this, Snapchat's parent company, Snap, committed to urgently improving its ability to detect drug sales on its social network, and began diverting users looking for drug-related content to educational portals.

Snapchat gave a glimpse of its progress yesterday, with the company noting that 88 percent of the drug-related content it finds is now proactively identified by automated systems, with community reporting accounting for 12 percent.

Snap says this number is up by a third since its October update, suggesting that more of such content has been detected before it was discovered by users.

"Since this fall, we've also seen other important indicators of progress (such as) a decline in community-reported content related to drug sales," Snap said in its official blog post quoted from TechCrunch, Wednesday, January 19.

“In September, more than 23 percent of Snapchatters' drug-related reports contained content specifically related to sales, and as a result of our proactive detection work, we've lowered that to 16 percent this month. This marked a 31 percent drop in drug-related reports. We will continue to work to get this figure as low as possible."

Recently Snap has also introduced a new protection that prevents users aged 13 to 17 from appearing in Quick Add users search results unless they have friends with whom the person searching is.

The move is meant to prevent minors from connecting with users they don't know, and prevent online drug transactions.

Snapchat also added information from the CDC about the dangers of fentanyl to its harm reduction portal, dubbed Heads Up, and partnered with the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America (CADCA), a global nonprofit that works to prevent substance abuse through collaborative community efforts.