Delete Snapchat Day

After outrage sparked from parents around the nation for the pornographic content found on the "Cosmo After Dark" channel Snapchat cancelled its channel in hopes to soften the noise and out lash. Over the years Snapchat has been used to peddle porn through its 'Snapcash' feature, in which users send each other money within the app in exchange for pornographic imagery and videos. Teens have utilized this feature to view pornography and it has hardened the addiction in youth as the quick, easy, and covert payments for the material disappears shortly after you open it, leaving essentially no trace. This feature and the ease of transferring pornographic material from user-to-user has led to the creation of an underground amateur-porn ring.

Today, in hopes to fight pornography and its effect on all people, is "delete Snapchat day." This movement was started by Collin Kartchner, an Instagram influencer and social activist from Utah. In hopes to fight pornography on Snapchat Kartchner has created a program that will make its official launch today, June 1st at 6 p.m., and in doing so will challenge everyone around the world to delete the app. Showing the effectiveness and popularity of this movement, Kartchner has stated that “I have had at least a thousand kids already message me and say I didn't even wait until June first."

A youth who has seen the fruition of deleting Snapchat is Bray Hallman who shared,"I was addicted to pornography at the age of 12 years old, and Snapchat was a huge cause for that; it was so easy to send stuff, to receive stuff, I couldn't delete it. I had this addiction to Snapchat because I wanted it so bad I couldn't even delete it or get rid of it. I got to a point I was super depressed and even suicidal and I knew I needed to change something" After deleting Snapchat Bray has shared that his life has drastically changed for the better.

The Family Research Council has found that pornography "is a major threat to marriage, to family, to children and to individual happiness."

Pornography has been found to:

• Cause men and women to feel less satisfied with their conjugal relations and less emotionally attached to their partner.
• Be a pathway to infidelity and divorce, and is frequently a major factor in these family disasters.
• Create a loss of interest in sexual intercourse.
• Be a determinant in a loss of interest in good family relations.
• Create a higher tolerance for abnormal sexuality, including rape, sexual aggression, and sexual promiscuity.
• Produce the notion of women as commodities or as "sex objects."
• Cause viewers to initially feel shame, have diminished self-confidence, and sexual uncertainty.

Pornography not only harms the viewers, it also has been linked to cause an increase in human and sex trafficking as well as an increase in violence. The main defenses against pornography are a close family life, a good marriage and good relations between parents and children, coupled with deliberate parental monitoring of Internet use. Traditionally, government has kept a tight lid on sexual traffic and businesses, but today it is not regulated as it has been in the past, unless child pornography is concerned. Given the massive, destructive individual, marital, family, and social effects of pornography, it is time for citizens, communities, and government to reconsider their current indifferent approach and start fighting against pornography by deleting Snapchat.