For the last year, my Snapchat has been a deluge of unsolicited dick pics. This is my story.
I used to pull this amazing party trick. I'd pull up Snapchat on my phone, go into the screen where the pending snaps from non-friends waited for my approval, and approve 10 or so. "Ready to see some dick?" I'd ask. And sure enough, dick would be delivered. My friends would squeal in disgusted delight. At first, I did too. But not for long. I set out to understand where the far-away yodel had sounded to set off this avalanche of dicks.
For more than a year now, my Snapchat experience has been a deluge of unsolicited dick pics. Opening it up just a little bit to the public sends a torrent of genitalia my way — exclusively male genitalia, I should add. Dicks. Lots of dicks.
More troublingly, an ever increasing number of these seemed to come from teenage boys. Every once in a while, in addition to their junk, some unsolicited Snapchatter would show me their face, and some of them would appear to be well under 18. That's how I became aware of the disturbing fact that some of these illicit photos were coming from, well, kids. The most amazing thing about my party trick was that it revealed something of what kind of sick, sad, fucked-up world the teen internet can be.
I don't blanch easily at the site of boring old adult nudity, but having unsolicited child pornography sent to me made me extremely uncomfortable, and even worried I could get in trouble simply by having it land in my inbox. [BuzzFeed's legal team told me I'm "probably" not going to jail. Phew.]
Legality aside, this made Snapchat less useful for me. I was using the friends-only setting for receiving snaps. That meant if a new friend joined the platform and tried to add me, they would be lost in the dick deluge. I quickly lost the will to sort through all that junk looking for real people.
The thing is, these dicksnappers were not attempting to reach me, Katie Notopoulos, thirtysomething author of several articles about Snapchat on BuzzFeed. It's very easy to get in touch with Katie Notopoulos. My email address is at the bottom of all articles I write (see below!) as well as in my Twitter bio, public Facebook, and personal website, and it's not like I'm getting random photos of dicks in my email inbox. (Also: That is not a hint.) These men have no idea what my real name is, or that I work at BuzzFeed; they just know a username, and for some reason they think that username belongs to a hot babe who sends nudes. Or maybe they're just, you know, dicks.
The messages I get aren't attempts at conversation. They are just sad wieners, reaching out to the void, hoping for someone to answer their lonely wiener siren song. Often the unsolicited snaps were a simple black screen with some message typed out like, "Send nudes?" These jabronis had no idea who was on the receiving end of their horny solicitations.
I had a few theories of what started all this, but I quickly shot most of them down. I wrote a few articles about Snapchat back in 2012, and one of those articles included a screenshot with my username. That week I got a small handful of snaps from strangers who happened to read the articles, but then it dropped off to nothing. Also, I tweeted out my Snapchat name a few times, but not for months and months. Lastly, my username is "virginterminato" (it was an inside joke and I ran out of characters so the final "r" is cut off). The name has some innuendo, but it's also pretty obscure and doesn't exactly scream, "Ask this babe for nudes!" None of those reasons could explain the heavy stream of random users sending and asking for nudes.
So the next step was obvious: I asked these guys where they found my username. This was not as simple as I had imagined. Turns out these Playboy-sniffing, Cro-Magnon teens became demure and coy as a schoolgirl when it came to coughing up information.
I asked 40-plus people, "Where did you get my username?" Some did not reply. Some replied, but it was hard to keep track — Snapchat chats self-destruct in a somewhat haphazard way: sometimes completely, sometimes only parts of the chat disappear.
Most frustratingly, almost no one could or would answer my simple question. They either claimed they "had no idea," or they named some very vague concept like they found it "online" but couldn't elaborate. I smelled bullshit. Having no clue where you found a username doesn't jibe with the sexter motivations I associate with these hornbags.