Meta is rolling out more teen safety features for Instagram as it faces increasing scrutiny over how it handles privacy and safety for younger users. The latest updates aim to strengthen protections against sextortion.
Meta is rolling out more teen safety features for Instagram as it faces increasing scrutiny over how it handles privacy and safety for younger users. The latest updates aim to strengthen protections against sextortion.
More safety features for teens on Instagram
Instagram is launching a new set of features aimed at tackling sextortion, which is a type of blackmail that exploits sexual images or conversations to pressure victims into handing over money.
With these updates, Meta plans to make it tougher for “potentially scammy” accounts to target teens on Instagram. The company will start directing follow requests from those accounts to users’ spam folders or blocking them altogether. It is also testing an alert that warns teens when they get a message from a suspicious account, especially if it’s from a different country.
On top of that, if Meta detects a shady account following a teen, it’ll stop that account from seeing the teen’s followers or checking out any tags linked to their photos.
Image credit – Meta
While the company isn’t revealing exactly how it identifies “potentially scammy” accounts, a spokesperson mentioned they consider factors like the account’s age and whether it shares mutual followers with the teen it’s trying to connect with.
Meta is also stepping up its efforts to stop the sharing of intimate images. Instagram will now block users from taking screenshots or screen recordings of images sent via DMs through the app’s temporary messaging feature, and these images won’t be accessible from the web version of Instagram either.
Instagram will now block users from taking screenshots of images in DMs. | Image credit – Meta
The app is also rolling out its nudity protection feature, which it started testing earlier this year, to all teens. This tool automatically blurs any images with detected nudity shared in DMs and gives a heads-up along with helpful resources when such content is flagged.
All these updates are designed to tackle how sextortion scams typically happen on Instagram, where scammers pressure teens into sending intimate images and then use those images to threaten and blackmail them.
Some of these scams are run by individuals and groups that are actually organized on Meta’s platforms. As part of the crackdown, Meta said it removed 800 Facebook groups and 820 accounts tied to a group called the Yahoo Boys, who were trying to recruit and train new sextortion scammers.
Meta’s latest updates come at a time when the company is under growing pressure to ramp up safety measures for its youngest users. In fact, it’s currently facing a lawsuit from over 30 states over this very issue. So, I think it is definitely a smart move for Meta to step up its efforts to better identify scammers, remove their accounts, and keep them from returning.