Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedSpeaker unverified: belief
27 Apr 2026 Cheeky Pint What comes after smartphones, with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel
“I think because Snapchat is built around communication with your friends and family, because relationships are the number one predictor of positive mental health outcomes, of your ability to recover from a negative depressive event, it doesn't surprise me that because Snapchat's oriented around your real friends and connecting with your real friends, that it has positive outcomes when it's studied by researchers.”
— Speaker unverified
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Speaker unverified
- Attribution
- Not verified from this transcript
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 27 Apr 2026
- Publisher
- Cheeky Pint
Transcript context
…Yeah, I agree. The list of named apps feels like quite a clumsy implementation where, as you say, there are lots of apps in the App Store, especially with messaging apps and stuff. There's various substitutability between things. It seems like it'll obviously lead to people going to other apps. It's not clear what you've accomplished. As you think about teen usage in general... For example, there are lots of debates in lots of countries about teen mental health. I'm never quite sure how to pick through the data where like a lot of it is reliant on self-reported mental health data, which is just a hard index to use because you get changes in reporting standards and everything like that. But at the same time, you can imagine maybe bad engagement wells in which to draw people, and you can conceive a bad product direction to go in. I'm curious how you think of this. Do you think it's teens are figuring out a lot, and they have complex lives with lots going on, and it's easy to pick on social media apps or messaging apps as a scapegoat? Or do you think, "Look, there's a right way or a wrong way to design these products, and we spend a lot of time thinking about, 'No, that actually wouldn't be a great product affordance to have because it would lead to some bad outcomes'"? Do you think there is stuff to do at the app level or do you think it's just a convenient scapegoat? I think first and foremost, we have an enormous responsibility to make a product that we think can have a positive impact on the world. I think what's really interesting, you mentioned sort of social media more broadly, and there are a lot of studies that look at social media broadly. It includes Snapchat together with Instagram or TikTok or whatever. There are a small number of independent studies that we have not funded, or otherwise been involved with, that have tried to understand actually the impacts of different apps and tried to differentiate between different apps. I think what's so fascinating… I think now there's been maybe three or more of them: one out of Australia, I think one out of the Netherlands or something, one in the US that show that Snapchat actually has a positive impact on people's well-being and relationships. That's different than TikTok or Instagram, which is actually negatively associated with people's well-being. I think because Snapchat is built around communication with your friends and family, because relationships are the number one predictor of positive mental health outcomes, of your ability to recover from a negative depressive event, it doesn't surprise me that because Snapchat's oriented around your real friends and connecting with your real friends, that it has positive outcomes when it's studied by researchers. I think one of the challenges for us, obviously, is to make sure that people are understanding Snapchat's role and not just lumping us in with social media, because people use Snapchat very differently and primarily as a communications service. We really want to have a positive impact in the world; that's really important to us. We are proud of the fact that independent research continues to show that concerns about overuse of technology are warranted. That's why I think that that healthy balance is so important. There were plenty of studies back in the day with television. If you watch too much television, that's associated with negative health outcomes. I think too much of a good thing can be— Do you think there's a loneliness/connectedness spectrum with apps? You're saying if you go too far into the loneliness direction where you're going through the endless feed, and you're in hour four, that's maybe not a great place to end up, whereas what you guys are trying to encourage is more in the connectedness direction. You think that will lead to pretty good outcomes for teens or anyone else.…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.