Cosmopolitan Magazine, a vanity-focused publication, has released a new channel on Snapchat entitled "Cosmo After Dark." The channel is an "X-rated weekly edition that goes live every Friday at 6 p.m. and is exclusively dedicated to all things hot and horny."
The channel will appear in the "discover" section of the social media application and will be accessible to all users without parental controls.
Cosmopolitan has advertised the new channel by including sex playlists, solo and partner sex positions, kinky games, and their new "sexoscopes" that forecast what you may expect in your sex life for the week.
Once again, social media has glamorized pornography and has put real intimacy and innocence on the back burner.
Over the past year or so, Snapchat has slowly fallen in rank among other social media sites, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
As a publicly traded company, Snapchat is focused on bringing in monetary revenue, thus limiting barriers the company may set up against explicit content. The company is desperate to remain a top social media competitor; no idea is off limits anymore if it means more money flow.
As a frequent Snapchat user, I can attest to the statement that not all users browse the "discover" section. I typically do not trust the news I see on the app, nor am I interested in the advertisements they provide. However, I do believe the social media site has overstepped some boundaries.
Snapchat has an immense demographic of underage users, and an upward trend of child predation has been seen since the app launched in September 2011. Snapchat has become increasingly popular among child predators and has made investigations difficult "in law enforcement being able to investigate due to the safeguards Snapchat has in deleting both snaps and 'stories' after certain amounts of time."
The new "Cosmo After Dark" channel will only promote and make child predation on the app more accessible, as well as diminish younger generations ideas of intimacy and how a relationship should be treated.
I am all for social media platforms, including Snapchat, however, I think the "Cosmo After Dark" will only cause harm to underage Snapchat users. Adults can make their own decisions and use the channel as they please.