Meta-owned Instagram has introduced a series of proactive measures to fight against the alarming rise of sextortion crimes targeting teens and young adults. The social media giant is launching both an awareness campaign and new security tools aimed at safeguarding its users from sextortion.
Sextortion is a crime where scammers coerce victims into providing intimate images under the threat of public exposure. With the rise of social media platforms, this crime has become a global problem, especially among younger users.
One of Meta’s major initiatives is a new educational campaign designed to inform teens and parents about sextortion scams. The campaign, developed in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Thorn, a digital child protection organisation, focuses on helping young users identify the red flags of potential sextortion attempts.
These warning signs include overly aggressive behaviour, requests to exchange photos, and attempts to shift conversations to different platforms.
The campaign’s centrepiece is a short video aimed at teens that explains how to recognise a sextortion scam and highlights the importance of seeking help. The video directs users to Instagram’s dedicated page—Instagram.com/PrecentSextortion—where they can find tips and access tools such as NCMEC’s ‘Take it Down,’ which helps prevent the sharing of intimate images.
The educational content will be shown in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Meta is also enlisting the help of social media influencers to help educate people.
In conjunction with the awareness campaign, Meta is rolling out new safety features designed to make it harder for sextortion scammers to operate on their platforms. For instance, previously, teens could only receive messages from people they followed, but scammers could still request to follow them. Now, the account showing suspicious behaviours, such as being recently created or exhibiting other scam-related patterns, will face additional barriers, including having their follow requests automatically blocked or sent to a spam folder.
Meta is also testing a new feature to inform teens when they are chatting with someone who might be located in a different country, a common tactic used by sextortion criminals to deceive their victims.
Furthermore, the company is implementing stricter privacy measures to prevent scammers from leveraging users’ following and follower lists for blackmail. Accounts flagged for suspicious behaviour will no longer have access to these lists, nor will they be able to see the likes and tags on users’ posts.
In a significant update to messaging privacy, Meta will soon prevent users from taking screenshots or screen recordings of ephemeral content sent via Instagram’s ‘view once’ or ‘allow replay’ features. The move protects users from having sensitive images captured without their consent.
Meta is also expanding its nudity protection features in Instagram’s Direct Messages. By default, images that the platform detects contain nudity will be blurred for users under 18, with warnings about the risks associated with sharing explicit images. This feature, which began testing earlier this year, will be rolled out globally.
In July 2024, Meta purged 63,000 Nigerian accounts associated with sextortion. Although these initiatives are commendable, it was reported that Google and Meta entered into a secret deal targeting teenagers on Instagram in August.
In June, reports showed that Instagram’s algorithm recommended explicit content to kids.
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