Snapchat's DSA Ad Transparency
Snapchat's ad transparency tools fell far short of DSA requirements: the Ad Gallery was searchable only by advertiser name, the repository was unavailable 99.7% of the time observed, and commercial communications were not labelled on the web.
About this research
This online publication draws on an OSINT investigation.
- Publication
- Archived online publication
- Research approach
- OSINT investigation
Publication details prepared by Social Media Transparency from the original source.
Executive summary
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AI Forensics evaluated Snapchat's compliance with the Digital Services Act's advertising-transparency requirements in April, testing the accessibility and functionality of its public Ad Gallery and repository.
The investigation found three significant shortcomings: the Ad Gallery could only be searched by advertiser name, limiting users' ability to look up ads by other criteria such as topic or region; the ad repository was unavailable for 99.7% of the observation period due to a rate-limiting issue, effectively blocking access to the transparency tool for nearly the entire monitoring window; and commercial communications on the web version of Snapchat were not labelled as advertising.
Following engagement between AI Forensics and Snap's DSA Compliance Team, the availability issue was resolved through a fix deployed on April 29, bringing uptime from near zero to approximately 100%. The report concludes that while the outage was fixed collaboratively, the underlying search-functionality limitations and the lack of commercial-communication labeling on the web remained unaddressed, leaving Snapchat's ad transparency tools short of full DSA compliance.
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