Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel is on a bit of PR push of late, with the company putting him forward for two recent long-form video interviews, in which Spiegel has shared his thoughts on the evolution of social media, the role that Snap plays in the landscape, AR development, AI, and more.
This week, Spiegel has appeared on Steven Bartlett’s “Diary of a CEO” podcast, giving a two and a half hour long overview to share his various thoughts on the industry.
And Spiegel covers off on all the major social media topics, including competition from Meta, the impact of Elon Musk and X, moderation, TikTok, and more.
Here are some of the key notes from Spiegel’s chat:
Spiegel first discusses the evolution of Snapchat, and his own journey towards inventing the app, which came about after a period of studying in Cape Town.
Spiegel also discusses the deliberate differentiation in the app, which opens to the camera and removes the focus on vanity metrics.
Which Spiegel says has helped to make Snapchat a more positive user experience.
“One of the things that was so fascinating was just in the last year, there were independent studies out of the Netherlands and Australia. It was comparing Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. The study determined there were no negative mental health implications of using Snapchat, but there were negative mental health implications of using Instagram and TikTok. And I think this study in the Netherlands found Snapchat actually promotes wellbeing and helps promote your relationships as well.”
He also takes the opportunity to poke Meta for copying Snap’s ideas in this respect:
“One of the things that’s incredibly irritating about it is [that Meta] repurposes our inventions to make products that make people feel unhappy and bad about themselves.”
This is an interesting claim, because there are also negative aspects to Snapchat, including bullying and sextortion, which occur in secret due to its disappearing messages. But Snap users don’t have the same negative comparisons and related mental health impacts that they would on other apps, so there are probably other areas to examine to get a true gauge on this.
But right now, Spiegel seems to feel confident enough to take the high road on Meta in this respect.
Spiegel also touches on content moderation, and the wider debate around what social platforms should allow in their apps:
“This whole notion of censorship doesn’t apply to companies that are private businesses, [which] actually have a First Amendment right to decide what content is on their platform. They may want to decide, ‘We’re open to literally anything. Anything goes. No problem.’ And it seems like some platforms are making that choice. But other platforms like ours say, ‘Hey, in order to have a healthy set of discourse across our platform, in order to make sure people feel comfortable when they’re doing content on our platform, we don’t want people to come across pornography, for example, or violent content or hateful content.’ That’s not something that makes people feel good.”
Again, it’s somewhat selective framing from Spiegel, as Snapchat is definitely used to send nudes and other controversial content. It’s just not publicly accessible, so it doesn’t get the same scrutiny. So it’s somewhat easy for Spiegel to, say, ban pornography in the main, public-facing app, but that doesn’t mean that Snap’s totally free of such material, and in potentially more harmful form.
Still, Spiegel again seems to feel confident in where Snapchat’s placed within the broader content discourse, taking another opportunity to jab at Meta in regards to its recent content moderation changes:
“I think [since] Elon bought Twitter, now called X, that it’s almost like this domino effect has happened in terms of content moderation, in terms of the types of voices on social media, in terms of this big movement around censorship and free speech. There’s also been this splintering of social media where lots of people are now like leaving certain platforms and going to Bluesky and Threads, and Rumble was the only sort of big, right-leaning platform just a couple of years ago, and now, I don’t know, it seems like it’s all changing before our eyes […] What’s really interesting about [Meta’s] choices is what they’ve tended to do is follow the political winds. So when Biden was president, and Mark’s been very public about this, they did a lot of very proactive content moderation, and that was something that, I guess, the White House at the time was asking them to do very proactively. And now it seems like this new administration has a different approach to content moderation, and Meta is following that.”
Spiegel says that this is a “survivalist instinct” from Zuckerberg and Meta, where depending on who’s in the White House, it’ll change its policies.
Which would seemingly be a fair observation. But it still feels a little bitter and antagonistic from Snap’s main man.
TikTok’s another target for Spiegel, who says that:
“I don’t use TikTok myself, because it’s from what I hear, it’s like crack cocaine for people, that they’re just on there for like three or four hours a day scrolling mindlessly.”
In terms of AR, and Snap’s potential as a leader in the space, even as competition heats up (with Meta and Apple developing their own AR glasses), Spiegel points to Snap’s AR development team, and its focus on innovation:
“We have hundreds of millions of people who are using [Snapchat’s] AR experiences on their phones. We have hundreds of thousands of developers who are making all of these AR experiences. When you have that very complicated technology, it’s hard to copy. And when you have an ecosystem of people who are using it, both in terms of developers and creators, and also our community who loves those AR experiences, it becomes very hard to copy the four million Lenses that developers created for our platform. Especially in the tech business, the faster you can evolve from being a feature or product to a real platform, that’s where the value is created over the long term.”
So Spiegel’s banking on Snap’s expanded AR capacity and nous to help it fend off competition from Meta in particular, though Meta’s AR glasses are looking like they’ll soon be the standard in the space, with sales of its Ray Bans rising, and the technical specifications of its AR glasses exceeding Snap’s AR-enabled Spectacles.
We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out, but it’s hard to see how Snap will realistically be able to compete with its much more well-resourced competitors, though Spiegel is undoubtedly correct that Snap remains a leader in AR innovation and AR experience leadership.
Spiegel also discusses U.S.-China trade, and the potential challenges of limiting such. Snap’s working with Chinese manufacturers for its Spectacles glasses, and it will be even tougher for Snap to compete if it’s forced to relocate that production to the U.S.
“The issue that the business community has right now is there’s not enough clarity in that regard. So the more clarity the government can create and say, ‘These areas are open for business, and these areas are where we’re going to compete and we’re not going to collaborate.’ That would help the business community because what’s so frustrating, imagining as a Chinese entrepreneur right now, is building this really successful company, and then the US government saying, ‘Hey, given our country and our values and the strategic relationship we have with China, this is not going to work.’”
Obviously, Spiegel’s hope is that China trade remains open, but this could be another area of risk for the company, as it looks to move to the next stage.
And you can bet that Zuckerberg, and Meta’s army of Washington lobbyists, will be pushing to implement restrictions that hurt Snapchat, and other Meta competitors, while benefiting its own interests.
Some interesting observations from the perspective of somebody in the midst of the social media shift, with, effectively, an outsider’s view of how the big players dominate the space, and how Snap has been able to compete.
Will it be able to keep competing in future? It seems that Spiegel is cautiously optimistic, but it also feels like a front, of sorts, to set a counterargument against Meta’s dominance.
You can check out Spiegel’s full interview here.
