A user who “sends nudes” is actually sending them to Snapchat, the company, who then sends them to the user’s friends. Snapchat also stores the nudes on its servers, and likely even has code that processes (reads!) those images for analytics purposes.

It’s not like Snapchat servers are some blackbox, either. Any engineer at the company with proper access rights could theoretically view any user’s uploads.

So I’m not sure “they’re sending them to each other” can really be a defense here, unless the media is truly e2e encrypted (it’s not).