The company unveiled new insights into the diversity of content appearing in its Stories page as part of a broader initiative to ensure greater inclusion and representation in its funded content inside the app, Snap said.
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It says: "We believe the content on our platforms should represent the Snapchat community and what they're interested in. To that end, Snap did an audience assessment, its first ever content audit to take a closer look at partnered content on the Stories page, to better understand the quantum and quality of on-screen representation of different identity groups. We'll use these results to inform future programming and partnerships on our platforms.

Snap conducted two studies on the front, collaborating with the University of California, the University of Southern California, and KRI to measure representational equity within its programming.

The results were that Snap-commissioned content is consistent with the industry, but Snap asserts it can do more to get better and to ensure there is more diversity in content.

Some of the key takeaways:

Black or African American account for 17.7 percent of characters in Snap-partnered content, which outpaces general population at 13.4 percent. Yet the Hispanic/Latinx makes up 5.2 percent of characters; where, in comparison, general population makes 18.5 percent.
Female characters comprised 37% of on-screen presence versus ~50% of the total population. Other trends are that women characters were more present in niche genre categories such as Beauty, Fashion & Style, Animals, DIY & Crafts, Animation, Parenting.
Underrepresented racial and ethnic group characters are likely to be present in content published by channels connected with Sports, Beauty, Parenting, Travel, and General Satisfying geners.
In addition to this, the KRI global identity study found that in the majority of markets, around 20% or more of daily Snapchatters are members of the LGBTQ+ community.

With these findings in mind, Snap's committed to improving representation in its commissioned programming, which will importantly include a focus not only on representation itself, but also on how characters are portrayed within its shows.

Snap also mentions that it will collaborate with creative partners to highlight representation while building new tools to monitor its progress in these areas.

It's a very sensitive area and also one that is important; while representation is indeed the critical element, it can veer into tokenism when done wrong and also feel very disingenuous and forced. Facilitating the right approach is a challenge to many writers that are trying to meet a defined quota or set goal on this front.

The real aim is bringing forward relevant, representative stories from different communities instead of having all such direct targets across the board. At the same time, though, the importance of reflection of a more universal set of views and characters does require education on this front.

So, that is a good initiative, hopefully one that will help Snap better cater to all audience segments.