Short answers, pulled from the story.
Snapchat was created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, all former students at Stanford University. It launched on the 8th of July 2011 under the name Picaboo before being relaunched as Snapchat on the 16th of September 2011. Brown was ousted from the company months after launch and later settled with Spiegel and Murphy for $157.5 million in September 2014.
In 2023, Snapchat had over 300 million monthly active users. In July 2022, the company reported 347 million daily active users. In 2024, the countries with the most Snapchat users were India with 202.5 million users, followed by the United States with 106.5 million.
The Lemmon v. Snap lawsuit arose from a May 2017 crash in Wisconsin where a group of teens used Snapchat's speed filter while their car reached 123 mph, then crashed into a tree and killed all three occupants. In May 2021, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act did not shield Snapchat from liability for the product design of the speed filter itself. Snap Inc. settled the case for an undisclosed amount in 2021, and Snapchat removed the speed filter in June 2021.
In 2014, Snapchat settled a Federal Trade Commission complaint finding it had exaggerated how thoroughly images could be made to self-delete. Snapchat was not fined but agreed to have its practices monitored by an independent party for 20 years. In September 2024, the FTC included Snapchat in a report on nine companies whose data collection practices were found to put individuals at risk of identity theft, stalking, discrimination, and emotional distress.
Snapchat Discover launched in January 2015 as an area containing channels of ad-supported short-form content from major publishers including BuzzFeed, CNN, ESPN, Mashable, People, and Vice. It was the company's main shift from prioritizing user growth to monetization through paid advertising and publisher partnerships.
A tweet from Kylie Jenner in February 2018 criticizing the redesign Snapchat had announced in November 2017 reportedly caused Snap Inc. to lose more than $1.3 billion in market value. Over 1.2 million people had already signed a Change.org petition asking Snapchat to revert the update, citing that sending snaps and rewatching stories had become more complicated under the new design.