By hiding both reach and engagement counts for users 13 to 15, Snap is rewriting what "public" means on a shortform surface, and handing the rest of the industry a template it may not want to copy.
Snap is quietly retreating from the "open by default" model that defined the first era of shortform video, starting with its youngest users.
The company said on Wednesday that teens aged 13 to 15 can no longer post to Spotlight, the TikTok-style feed inside Snapchat. Instead, those users will get a new "Profile" surface inside the app where their shortform videos sit next to their Stories and are visible only to mutual friends. The Profile page will also hide engagement signals such as favorite counts from the same age group, removing the public scoreboard that has defined shortform video since the format went mainstream.
Snap announced the change on June 10, 2026. According to the company's own post, the new Profile surface is "designed to encourage creativity and self-expression within a trusted audience" and includes "friends-only visibility" and "no favorite counts" for users under 16. Previously, Snapchatters under 16 could post to Spotlight without attribution to their profile — a design that let teens participate while limiting the public-facing contact risk. The new arrangement moves that cohort to a friends-only distribution surface.
The Spotlight change is the second half of a pattern Snap started laying down years ago. Stories posts from users in the 13-to-15 age group were already hidden from non-friends by default. The new Profile surface extends that logic to shortform video: if you don't already know the teen, you can't see what they posted. The mechanism is less "private account" and more "private distribution channel," because the video itself isn't locked. It just stops being routed to anyone outside the teen's friend graph.
The previous design was unusual in one specific way. Although the videos themselves were publicly viewable on Spotlight, Snap did not link a younger teen's profile page to their public posts, so a stranger watching a clip could not easily trace the post back to the teen's account. That decoupling was a partial mitigation. It is now a closed surface, and the metric on top of it goes away with it.
That distinction is the part that matters. Most platform teen-safety tools work by gating access. The teen can still post; the post just isn't reachable to strangers. Snap's move goes one step further. By removing the favorite count from the Profile surface, the company is also taking apart the feedback loop that has driven shortform video culture since Vine: the dopamine hit of a viral clip, the anxiety of a flat one, the public ranking that tells a 14-year-old whether their video "worked." Hiding the post from strangers is a privacy setting. Hiding the metrics is a product design choice about what kind of behavior the surface is allowed to reward.
Snap is making this choice under unusual pressure. The company has faced increasing scrutiny over its handling of teen safety and privacy and is currently defending multiple lawsuits over its record on child safety, according to reporting by Engadget and others. The timing of a default-on restriction on a public surface for minors is hard to read as anything other than a defensive product decision made with legal and policy teams in the room. A toggle on a private surface for minors is, at this point, table stakes for any major social platform. Removing the metric from the same age cohort is not.
That is the part worth watching for the rest of the industry. TikTok and Instagram both run "teen accounts" with restricted defaults, but neither has, to date, removed the like or favorite count for teen creators on its shortform surfaces. YouTube Shorts follows a similar pattern. If Snap's metric-stripping experiment holds, the more interesting question is whether regulators, state attorneys general, or plaintiffs' lawyers will start treating the presence of public engagement counts on teen shortform video as a design defect rather than a feature.
There is a real chance this is also a one-platform product tweak that the broader industry treats as a one-platform product tweak. Snap's user base skews younger than its peers' and its ad business is under more direct pressure from the app stores and from Apple and Google's age-related policy changes. The company has structural reasons to act first. But the mechanism Snap chose, restricting both reach and reward, not just one, is the version of "teen safety" that litigation and regulation have been inching toward. A privacy setting is something a competitor can match in a sprint. A redesigned surface that strips a public metric is a much harder thing to walk back once it ships.
The change is the more meaningful of the two not because Snap announced it, but because of the thing Snap chose to remove.