Snapchat is turning off its Find Friends feature by default for child users in the United Kingdom, Ofcom said on 6 November 2026. Ofcom’s Online Safety Group director Oliver Griffiths said the change starts from that day, with the rollout to complete this month, and that Snapchat has committed to age checks for under-18s by the end of the year.
Snapchat’s UK Safety Updates help article matches the regulator’s framing: friend suggestions in Find Friends are off by default for users under 18 in the UK under the Online Safety Act. Controls labelled Enable Find Friends and Show me in Find Friends stay off unless the user opts in. Contact syncing and exact username Search still work.
What stays on when suggestions go dark
The policy change is narrower than a full discovery blackout. Snap’s help text keeps two paths open: syncing a phone’s contacts to find people the user already knows, and typing an exact username in Search. What flips off by default is the suggestion layer that surfaces possible friends without that deliberate step.
That distinction matters for parents and schools reading “Find Friends off” as a hard stop. Under-18 accounts in the UK will not be auto-suggested into others’ friend lists through the Find Friends feature unless those toggles are turned on. They can still be found if someone syncs contacts that include them or knows their exact Snapchat username. Ofcom’s update does not claim contact sync or Search are disabled.
Griffiths’s Ofcom note also separates the default-off rollout from age assurance. The age-check commitment is “by the end of the year,” not a statement that robust age checks are already live for every under-18 account today. Treating the November Find Friends change as proof that Snapchat has finished its age-assurance programme would over-read both primaries.
Where this sits in TSN’s child-safety file
UK platforms are already under a thick Ofcom child-safety agenda. TSN covered Ofcom’s naming of four age-check methods for the planned under-16 social media ban and the High Court backing Ofcom’s information notices to Meta, X and TikTok. Separately, Turkey’s e-Devlet age-token rules bar under-15s from social media and restrict 15-to-17-year-olds — a harder gate than Snapchat’s UK default-off suggestions.
Snapchat’s move is a product-default change under the Online Safety Act, not a new statute and not an AI-model rule. It belongs with child-online-safety Tech for Good coverage rather than AI regulation hubs: the mechanism is friend discovery, not generative models.
Defaults move faster than age checks
For compliance readers, the sequence is the story. Ofcom gets a visible safety win this month — suggestions off by default for UK child users — while the harder problem of proving age remains a year-end promise. Defaults can ship in an app update; age assurance needs methods, appeals and false-positive handling that Ofcom has already been spelling out in its under-16 work.
That gap is also why contact sync and exact Search remaining available is not a loophole invented by critics; it is Snap’s own help-centre wording. A determined adult who has a teen’s number or username can still connect. The change raises the friction on ambient discovery, which is the feature Ofcom and Snap both name. Griffiths’s Ofcom update presents the Find Friends default as an immediate child-protection step inside a wider industry call to action, not as the finished Online Safety Act compliance package for Snapchat.
UK readers are the audience: this is a GB product change under UK online-safety law. Non-UK Snapchat accounts are outside these two pages’ claims unless Snap later mirrors the setting elsewhere.
What to watch next
Three public breadcrumbs would move the file: Snap or Ofcom confirming the Find Friends rollout is complete nationwide; Snap publishing how Enable Find Friends / Show me in Find Friends behave for newly created under-18 accounts; and evidence that the promised under-18 age checks are live before year end, with a named method. Until then, the dual primary record is default-off Find Friends suggestions for UK under-18s this month, with contact sync and exact Search still available, and age checks still ahead.
Sources
Primary:
- Ofcom: Update following its call to action on tech industry to improve protections for children (6 Nov 2026)
- Snapchat Help: Safety Updates for UK Users
Related stories
- Ofcom Names Four Age Checks for the UK’s Under-16 Social Media Ban
- Turkey Bars Under-15s From Social Media Using e-Devlet Age Tokens
- High Court Backs Ofcom Over Meta, X and TikTok Information Notices
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