Snapchat faces EU probe over minor grooming, illegal drug sales, and weak age verification

The European Commission has launched a full in-depth investigation into the social media app Snapchat to determine whether it is failing to protect minors under the stringent rules of the Digital Services Act (DSA). The probe is questioning Snapchat's age verification system, default privacy settings, and other content moderation tools.

The move is quite an escalation in the European Union's ongoing effort to rein in Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs). Over the last few years, the DSA has gone from just a regulatory framework to a full-blown enforcement mechanism. We already know that the European Commission stated that Meta and TikTok could be violating the DSA due to opaque data access and convoluted reporting mechanisms.

This is also not Snapchat's first time against the EU regulators. In late 2024, the EU requested detailed algorithm data from YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok to understand how their recommendation engines mitigate risks to minors and civic discourse.

Although this time, the investigation will go much deeper. The Commission's investigation is focusing on five critical areas where Snap Inc. might be breaching the DSA:

1. Weak age assurance: Snapchat's terms state that users must be at least 13 years old, but the platform relies mostly on self-declaration. The EU says this doesn't guarantee that young children under 13 will stop using the app.
2. Grooming and criminal recruitment: The EU regulators add that Snapchat isn't doing enough to protect minors from adults with harmful intent. Since adults can lie about their age easily or alter it after registration, the platform's safeguards for stopping sexual exploitation or recruitment for criminal activities may not be effective.
3. Inadequate default account settings: The Commission says that for minors, maximum privacy should be the default, not something in an opt-in toggle hidden deep in the settings section. It has been flagged that Snapchat auto-recommends minors to other users in its "Find Friends" system, leaves push notifications on by default, and fails to provide adequate privacy guidance during account creation.
4. Sale of prohibited products: The Commission adds that Snapchat's content moderation tools simply fail to curb the risks of illegal and age-restricted goods such as drugs, alcohol, and vapes. With this formal proceeding, the Commission is actually taking over a parallel investigation that was originally launched by the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) in September 2025, regarding the sale of vapes to minors on the app.
5. Opaque reporting mechanisms: Similar to the investigation against Meta and TikTok, the Commission says Snapchat is using "dark patterns" to make reporting illegal content unnecessarily difficult, while also failing to inform users about their options for redress or internal complaint handling.

The EU would be relying on its 2025 DSA Guidelines on the protection of minors as a strict benchmark for compliance, which explicitly state that minors should not be easily detectable by adults, shouldn't have adults recommended as contacts, and must be granted the highest level of privacy by default.

If Snapchat is found guilty of breaching the DSA, it could face massive fines of up to 6% of its global annual turnover, along with orders to overhaul its platform architecture.