Facebook emerged during the US election as a central political and news source, but also a hub for hoaxes, propaganda, and outright fake news — an issue that brought wide criticism and concern from figures reportedly including President Barack Obama.

But its leading US competitor, Snap (formerly Snapchat), has managed to sidestep the issue. Snap now boasts 150 million daily users, roughly 10 million more than Twitter. It’s a growing source of breaking news for its users. When Donald Trump purchased a national “Crooked Hillary” geo-filter during the presidential debates, it was viewed 80 million times, and yet the sometimes controversial social network doesn’t come up in the rancorous debates over fake news.

There are a handful of obvious reasons why Snapchat might be a less fertile ground for propaganda from Macedonian teens, hoax purveyors, or hyperpartisan websites masquerading as news. User-generated content on Snapchat disappears after a short period of time. News is contained in a separate section, called Discover. Posts from the people you follow are displayed chronologically, not by popularity or personalized algorithm.

On Snapchat, the name of the game is projecting authenticity, not racking up faves, and the rules of the game are enforced in the way the app is designed. Snapchat profiles do not display a follower count or even let users know how many followers they have. Plus, it’s hard to go viral when you can’t pass around a link to an individual’s post.

As Farhad Manjoo noted in the New York Times, “The diminution of personalization algorithms and virality also plays into how Snapchat treats news.”

The process publishers go through to get on Discover is as controlled as the rest of the app and involves a number of human gatekeepers along the way, a Snap representative told BuzzFeed News. Before they can post in Discover, news publishers have to be vetted as a potential partner, an agreement that comes with strict terms. Discover partners who publish daily on Snapchat in the US, France, and UK include recognizable names like CNN, MTV, Le Monde, Sky News, and Cosmopolitan. Jim VandeHei, the co-founder of Politico, even created a presidential campaign-specific Discover channel called We the People, in partnership with NowThisNews, but content, like today's offering, "Are you ready for texts from Trump?" seems more pop culture than partisan. (NowThisNews shares an investor with BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed is a Discover partner in both the US and UK; BuzzFeed also ran NBC's Snapchat content during the summer Olympics.)

Although publishers have editorial independence, there is collaboration between staffers who produce content for the app and Snapchat’s Discover team, which gives guidance on formatting. Content can be optimized to do well on Facebook and Twitter by altering the headline or image, but on Snapchat, articles have to be reformatted to fit the app. Publishers can deep-link to stories to their Discover content, but those links take you back to the app.



These features were built around Snap’s belief that users who share and consume content from friends provide the most potential for long-term growth, Rob Fishman, co-founder of Niche, a company that connects brands with social media influencers, told BuzzFeed News. “Snapchat makes discovery of people who aren’t in your phone book extremely difficult because they believe peer-to-peer sharing is stickier than a so-called influencer model,” said Fishman, whose company was acquired by Twitter in 2015. “They do see value in premium and traditional publishers, but they’ve created a stand-alone experience to capture that kind of content.”