Pennsylvania's Snap case makes an App Store questionnaire the alleged lie

Apple hands Snap a questionnaire, and Snap's answers do two jobs: they set the 13+ label, and they generate the descriptor text saying the app contains only infrequent profanity and crude humour, sexual content or nudity, drug and alcohol references, and mature themes ^[2]. The same process produces a T for Teen rating in the Google Play and Microsoft stores, and Pennsylvania says all of it is false ^[3].

The proof follows Apple's own taxonomy. The complaint walks category by category through what the investigator's account reached, including videos of young men rolling cannabis, a man mixing and drinking spirits on camera, and captions using opioid slang from accounts framed as 14 and 15 years old ^[4]. Under sexual content it lists paid advertisements for a streaming app running explicit clips, alongside creator videos ^[5]. The account was registered at 13, the floor of the rating those answers produced ^[19], so the state is not describing a child who lied about their age to get somewhere they should not be.

Then the blank space. Paragraphs 56, 57, 61 and 68 are empty in the Public Redacted filing, two of them after the drug examples and two after the sexual content examples, which is the position a complaint uses for what a company knew internally ^[6].

Counts two and three are the more familiar argument and the harder one. Count two says Snap failed to disclose that Snapchat is addictive; count three says the design is unfair whatever Snap disclosed ^[7], naming ephemeral content, infinite scroll, push notifications, autoplay, Snapscores, Snapstreaks and Charms ^[8]. The detail that will travel is commercial: a Snapstreak dies after 24 hours of silence, and Snap sells a one-time fee to restore a lost one ^[11]. Sunday said at a press conference that the feature "puts a tangible value on friendships and influences a child's feelings of self-worth" ^[12]. The complaint saves its sharpest phrase for the Friend Solar System, a paid Snapchat+ feature where tapping a Best Friends badge shows which planet you are in that person's system, calling it "perhaps Snapchat's most extreme method of user manipulation" ^[13].

Those two counts need experts, and the state has asked for its expert-witness expenses alongside a declaration, temporary and permanent injunctions, and civil penalties for willful violations ^[14]. Count one needs a handset. That asymmetry is the operational point, because the complaint, filed by senior deputy attorney general Jonathan Burns of the office's Technology and Privacy Protection Unit ^[15], attaches no damages figure while citing Snap's 2024 North American revenue above $5.3bn, a company value above $12bn, and tens of thousands of Pennsylvania users under 16 ^[16].

Snap's reply is about architecture: the app "opens to a camera, not a feed of content" and was built for self-expression and authentic connection with friends ^[17], and the company says it shares the attorney general's commitment and is disappointed he chose litigation rather than working together ^[18]. That is an answer to counts two and three. It does not speak to whether the questionnaire answers were accurate on the day an investigator's 13-year-old account went looking.