I love using Snapchat and am one of the 150 million humans in the world that uses it every day. It's how I keep up with the random, simple, hilarious details of my friends lives and share and save the important and not-so-important moments of my own.



Unfortunately, every time I go to watch the stories my friends post on Snapchat, I am bombarded with featured stories from Cosmopolitan, Daily Mail, and others. And it is not just what the latest is on politics, sports, or fashion. Those stories are there to find, but they are not the first ones that come up in the feed. The first ones I see, obviously very calculated in their placement, contain sexually explicit headlines and pictures that if I had the option to remove, I would. Do I have the option of whether or not to watch the featured story in its entirety? Yes. But do I still have to see the headline and provocative photos that advertise them without the option of removing it? Yes. And that's not okay.



As a Millennial, having customized content- content that pertains to my interests - is important to me. On Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, I can report and remove content I do not want in my feed, and I use this feature all the time. Snapchat, however, does not have this option.

I do not care to see articles about how to improve my sex life, how to lose my virginity, or what I should know about what guys like in bed. To me, that is offensive and disgusting. What frustrates even me more is that I am not the only person exposed to this pornographic material. I hate to think that my younger siblings, friends, and millions of other young people as young as 13 years old are exposed to this content multiple times a day without the option of blocking it. But that is the current reality. I am at the point where I am considering deleting the app, like many others have, just so I do not have to see the explicit material posted in the unavoidable Featured section of the app on a daily basis.

My voice is one of thousands of others who feel the same. Let's tell Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, cofounders of Snapchat, as well as Nick Bell, VP of Content, that we, the users, want more control over what we see as featured stories on Snapchat. Some of us actually DO NOT want to see pornography, and we should have the right to opt out of viewing it.