Snapchat partners with TurboVote to put links to register in users' profile pages and partners with some pubs on “swipe up” option, says 80% of US users are 18+
Snapchat is the latest social network to roll out a voter registration initiative in the run up to the 2018 midterm elections.
Context & Ripple Effects
Snapchat is entering the midterm registration race a week after Instagram began running Stories and feed ads pointing over-18 users to voting info — the two moves confirm that registration links have become table stakes for social platforms in election season. The platform has been building toward this since politicians first used Snapchat to court young supporters ahead of the 2016 election, and Snap's claim that 80% of its US users are 18+ is the argument that it can reach newly eligible voters at scale.
The mechanics are deliberately low-friction: TurboVote supplies the registration flow on profile pages, and select publishers get a 'swipe up' unit, so the burden falls on distribution rather than new product build.
First-order effects
- TurboVote gains placement inside Snapchat profiles and publisher swipe-ups, putting its registration flow in front of an audience Snap says is overwhelmingly adult.
- Publishers in the partner set get a civic-engagement format that doubles as a swipe-up engagement driver during midterms coverage.
Second-order effects
- With Instagram moving in parallel, registration prompts become a competitive expectation among social platforms, pressuring the rest to match rather than opt out.
- Campaigns and civic groups gain a measurable youth channel, shifting some outreach spend from bought media to platform-native registration placements.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platforms become standing civic infrastructure for young-voter registration — a trajectory the corpus bears out as Snap later reported more than 400K registrations driven by an in-app push and scaled the toolset further by 2020.
- That role invites scrutiny of how platforms curate election information, extending the regulator challenge flagged when politicians first adopted the app in 2016.
The trend: Social platforms are institutionalizing voter-registration tools each election cycle, turning youth-heavy networks like Snapchat into recurring civic-registration channels.