Snapchat ex-employees say past editorial practices were racially biased

Last week, Snap for standing up for Black Lives Matter.

But former employees on the content team told Mashable the company didn’t always embrace the fight for racial justice so vehemently. One claimed their manager said a Men’s Fashion Week story featured too many black faces. Another said their editors thought stories on black entertainers were too niche. Overall, they described a culture from 2015 to 2018 in which they had to advocate for black representation in the face of racial bias from managers.

“It was constantly a battle of basically arguing with people about their whitewashed views of what good content was,” one ex-employee said. “Some days we felt it was our job to be fighting for these voices, and other days it was too exhausting to even put up that fight.”

In 2016, Snap came under fire for racially insensitive filters: one , another gave users . Yet another turned people into Bob Marley, effectively . Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter movement had been fighting police brutality and racism since 2012. 

In this climate, some members of the “” team, which picked snaps for stories in Snapchat’s Discover tab, said they felt unsupported and marginalized by their managers, who made decisions within a convoluted organizational structure.

Mashable spoke with five former Snapchat employees who worked on the content team between 2014 and 2018. Four of them requested anonymity for privacy and professional reasons. The anonymous ex-employees were let go in in 2018, and received around three months severance. 

Still more members of the Snap community voiced their support and corroborated some experiences on Twitter.

Snap said it’s investigating most of the instances of alleged racial insensitivity presented to the company by Mashable, and directly addressed allegations by Diana Baik, an entertainment producer who said that in 2017 a manager asked her to essentially replace snaps of black people with people of different races. 

“We really appreciate Diana speaking up about her experience at Snap,” the company said. “What Diana describes doesn’t reflect our values or aspirations as a team to provide content that reflects the diversity of the Snapchat community. We are investigating these allegations and will take the necessary actions to make things right.”

What Baik and the other ex-employees describe is starkly different from what Snap says its current policies are. Today, Snap regularly features Black Lives Matter content, and says it has committed to making its Discover tab free of racist content — including .

The company also in 2019. And this year, Evan Spiegel sent to employees publicly supporting Black Lives Matter and even calling for the creation of a reparations commission, which was one of the most progressive stances in the tech world.

However, ex-employees say that recent progress doesn’t mean that Snapchat’s previous missteps should be absolved, or forgotten.

“I think Snapchat’s come a long way since the time we specifically worked there, but with that being said, I don’t think that how things were handled at the company should be brushed under the rug,” the same ex-employee first quoted in this story said. “We want them to see that there are problems, and they need to be fixed.”

Friendly Faces

The content team covered daily life and big events with “Our Stories” built from snaps submitted by users (which were partially filtered through AI) and Snapchat employees. The former employees interviewed for this story say the process became fraught when it came to showcasing black people and black-themed events and holidays.

In one instance, an ex-employee said they received pushback from their manager when they wanted to use a photograph of the popular dance duo as the lead tile image for a curated story about dancing. Ayo and Teo are black, and wear face masks (even before COVID-19). The ex-employee said their manager was dubious, and said they wanted to use a “friendlier face” as the lead image.

“[The manager] didn’t know who they were, and made it a really big issue as to, ‘Why are we picking these people’ to be the image of the story,” the ex-employee said. “At the time, they had millions of followers, as they do now. But she took that image as not being a friendly face: two young black men in masks.”

Baik corroborated this incident, and Snap said it is under investigation.

The same manager was involved in an incident related to NYC Men’s Fashion Week in July 2017 that shocked multiple employees and prompted Baik to notify HR. (Mashable viewed the manager feedback Baik said she sent to HR. The text was saved in a timestamped note on her phone.) Baik says that after the manager reviewed the Fashion Week story, they requested that the editors replace some of the black people in the story with people of other races.

“[They] wanted to ‘bring diversity’ to the story by whitewashing it.”

“They said there are too many black people in this story,” according to Baik. “I couldn’t believe what I had heard. I could not believe [they] had said that.”

“[The editor] said the story is too black-heavy. Going through the snaps, [they] shook [their] head. [They] said, ‘Every person looks the same,’” said Baik. The editor told her they wanted them replaced, and said, ‘Yeah, our audience is going to think we didn’t make this for them.’ It was very clear to me in that moment [they were] saying replace them with snaps of white people.”

“[They] wanted to ‘bring diversity’ to the story by whitewashing it.”

Baik refused to make the changes, and, after consulting with colleagues about how upset she was, subsequently created a record of the event in a Google Doc, which Mashable has viewed. 

Baik also shared screenshots with Mashable of conversations she had with colleagues telling them about the incident at the time. Colleagues urged her to report the incident to HR, but in the conversations, she expressed that she was afraid of losing her job: “My job literally depends on [the manager], [the manager’s] gonna know it was me.” Nevertheless, Baik says she included the incident in an HR review of the manager.

“Nothing happened,” Baik said. “I didn’t hear from HR.”

The former director of public policy and director of operations, Micah Schaffer, supported Baik on Twitter, saying “it’s so unfair you didn’t have more support.” When reached for comment, Schaffer told Mashable that he stands by his support for Baik and the other ex-employees who spoke out on Twitter about race at Snap.

When asked about the event, Snapchat told Mashable that it’s looking into the HR complaint and the interaction as a whole.

Another ex-employee involved in the creation of the story corroborated Baik’s account. They say they don’t remember if they ended up making the changes to replace black faces with white ones. 

Keep it light

Between 2015 and 2018, Snap’s content team was mostly white. Out of approximately 50 staffers, less than 15 percent identified as people of color. (Snap, which confirmed that the team was mostly white, noted that it’s been focused on improving diversity recently.)

A former employee, who said they were one of “around three” black people on the team during the time, recalled frequently having to appeal to management to feature stories about black culture, particularly those focused on racial justice causes.

“I was very vocal, because of the fact that I was aware that [black] representation was not there [on the staff],” the ex-employee said. “If my voice was not included, we risked being extremely tone deaf. That was a burden I carried every time there was a story about my community.”

Another employee of color expressed similar sentiments to Mashable.

The ex-employee quoted above said that they had to lobby management to include more political phrases, such as “white privilege” and “racism,” in the written text and geofilters for stories around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2017. They felt that management only came around to their way of thinking when a white colleague supported the employee’s position, which another ex-employee corroborated.

A “breaking point” for the ex-employee came in 2017, around the curation of a Black History Month-themed story called . They wanted to feature content about the fight for racial justice. However, their manager said that it should lead with more cultural, light content, such as people dancing.

“I was pointing out that there is a need to have the actual context and substance at the front of the story to give people an idea of what the day is truly about,” the ex-employee said.

This led to a tense exchange, during which the ex-employee was made acutely aware that their work was being looked over and approved by an entirely white management team.

“I’m stressing to them the things that are important, and the things that make myself, my friends, and my family members young, black, and proud,” the ex-employee said. “I’m constantly getting feedback, and then I’m facing friction. I actually was asked a question by my senior manager at the time: ‘Do you think that you’re correct just because you’re black?’ And my response was ‘Absolutely,’ and I ended up hanging up the phone on her.”

‘Do you think that you’re correct just because you’re black?’

“When we did fight, we were only allowed to post them during Black History Month, because that was the only appropriate time to do it,” one ex-employee said.

Another employee corroborated the incident, and Snap said it is under investigation.

Baik and the other ex-employees said management was hesitant to feature stories highlighting black culture when there was not also a white cultural component. Baik said her manager asked her why she featured stories about artists like Jay-Z and Drake, and not “Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift.” Snap did cover several black culture-oriented festivals, such as AfroPunk, at the time. 

However, three ex-employees recounted an instance when one of the managers didn’t support coverage of a predominantly black music festival called Rolling Loud in Miami, which they said seemed unusual for the manager, who usually OKed and closely oversaw concert coverage. 

“I was pretty much told by [the manager] that it would probably fail, but if I wanted to do it, I had to do it all on my own,” the ex-employee said.

The ex-employee paid their own way to attend. Then, according to ex-employees, managers expressed shock when the content performed extremely well. 

At one point in summer 2017, management agreed to hold a “diversity content” brainstorm with the same manager mentioned above, Baik, and two other ex-employees with whom Mashable spoke about the event. The ex-employees present said that all of their suggestions around black culture were rebuffed. For example, despite the social media popularity of the HBO series , which follows a group of black twenty-somethings living in Los Angeles, the manager declined to feature content about the show, saying it wasn’t as popular as shows like The Walking Dead.

“When we had the brainstorm, it was like they just said yes [to the brainstorm] to say they did it,” one of the ex-employees present at the time said. “We came prepared with multiple stories to represent minority voices, and it felt like every pitch that was presented to them was shot down for one reason or another.”

Baik and other ex-employees say this showed them that Snapchat content managers wanted to cater to an audience they saw as predominantly white, like them.

“The word ‘niche’ was used a ton,” an ex-employee said. “This doesn’t appeal to the quote ‘Snapchat audience.’ Which meant this doesn’t appeal to me.”

Black Lives Mattered then, too

During July 2016 protests in Louisiana and Minnesota over the deaths of Anton Sterling and Philando Castile, respectively, Baik, along with two other ex-employees who were black, asked for approval to feature Black Lives Matter in an Our Story. They say that in a face-to-face meeting, the senior manager acted sympathetic, but wouldn’t give an answer as to whether they could cover Black Lives Matter in an Our Story, and didn’t explain their rationale.

“We came away from that interaction with [them] thinking that [the manager] doesn’t care about [their] employees of color, and didn’t seem to care about uplifting the voices of our black users, and shedding light on this movement,” Baik said.

Snap disagrees with the characterization of these events, and says it did publish a Black Lives Matter story at the time. Snap appears to be referring to the fact that it covered protests after the shooting of Philando Castile in a “protest story” called “.” Given the employees’ previous conversation with the manager, they were surprised, but pleased, that it had been covered.

Snap said it did cover protests as part of its News coverage, which was distinct from its Our Stories features, which focused on entertainment and culture. Our Stories were distinct from News stories in that they featured prompts, filters, and lenses designed to let users show support for causes, like Black Lives Matter. 

Snap also provided Mashable with evidence that it covered Black Lives Matter in April of 2016, and later in the year, through Community and Local Stories. Those were curated stories, displayed in Discover, for people within the same region or geographical radius of an event.

According to two ex-employees, Evan Spiegel articulated and defended the 2016 decision to showcase Black Lives Matter as news, not in Our Stories, at an all-hands meeting in New York that year. 

At the meeting, one ex-employee who spoke with Mashable asked Spiegel directly why Snapchat was not running Black Lives Matter-themed content in Our Stories. 

The prior year, Snap, with a different team managing Our Stories, published an Our Story on the marriage equality movement. Earlier in the summer of 2016, according to Baik, it also posted a story about Gay Pride. The ex-employee pushed Spiegel on why Snapchat was comfortable wading into the political waters of the marriage equality movement, but not, apparently, Black Lives Matter. 

“[Spiegel’s] answer to that was that Snap simply provides the platform, and we don’t enter our voice into anything political,” they said. “When I made that point [about marriage equality] Evan said, ‘I hear you, let’s talk more off line.’ And we never got a chance to speak more.”

Things are different today. Snapchat is currently running an “Identity Story” called “Living While Black,” which features black Snapchat users sharing their experiences with race and identity, with the help of Black Lives Matter stickers and lenses.

Snap gave Mashable a list of the current ways it is promoting racial equality content in Discover, Community Stories, and Snap Originals, such as a show called “While Black with MK Asante” and a Life and Culture Story prompting users to celebrate “black excellence” that it displays in the “For You” section of Discover.

Mashable asked for current statistics about people of color in management at Snapchat, and Snap said that it doesn’t release its diversity data, but has been making strides in hiring and is considering how to best make the data public. It requires employees to go through both diversity, equity, and inclusion training, and unconscious bias training. 

Snap’s editorial processes seem to have matured. What’s more — mirroring the trajectory of some — it has abandoned its politically neutral “we’re just a platform” stance to condemn racism and other forms of bigotry and oppression. That’s much more than Facebook can say, which has defended after that amplifies hate.

Snap pointed out to Mashable that there have been significant changes in the top-level management of its content team. However, the senior manager who ex-employees say didn’t initially support putting Black Lives Matter content in Our Stories in 2016 still works at Snap. The two managers that person supervised, who were involved in incidents described in this story, are still at the company as well.