Sextortion: Meta announces measures to protect users on Instagram

Meta has announced additional measures to further protect users from sextortion. These include hiding followers and following lists from potential sextortion scammers, preventing screenshots of certain images in DMs, and rolling out our nudity protection feature globally.

According to the Meta-owned social media platform, these updates, which are part of a campaign informed by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), Thorn & Childnet aim to help parents feel more equipped to support their teens in avoiding these scams.

Sextortion is a horrific crime, where scammers target young adults and teens around the world, threatening to expose their intimate imagery if they don’t get what they want. Sextortion scammers often use the following and follower lists of their targets to try and blackmail them.

According to Meta, the new safety features will make it even harder for sextortion criminals to succeed. “Now, we’re making it harder for accounts showing signals of potentially scammy behaviour to request to follow teens. Depending on the strength of these signals – which include how new an account is – we’ll either block the following request completely or send it to a teen’s spam folder”, it said in a statement.

Now, accounts we detect as showing signals of scammy behaviour won’t be able to see people’s followers or following lists, removing their ability to exploit this feature. These potential sextorters also won’t be able to see lists of accounts that have liked someone’s posts, photos they’ve been tagged in, or other accounts that have been tagged in their photos.

The platform also announced that soon users will no longer be able to use their devices to directly screenshot or screen record images or videos sent in messages. “This means that if someone sends a photo or video in Instagram DM or Messenger using our ‘view once’ or ‘allow replay’ feature, they don’t need to worry about it being screenshotted or recorded in-app without their consent”, it said.

Meta also indicated that it won’t allow users to open ‘view once’ or ‘allow replay’ images or videos on Instagram web, to prevent them from circumventing screenshot prevention.

Sextortion and safety: Doing more going forward

Meta has promised to constantly work to improve techniques used to identify scammers, remove their accounts and stop them from coming back.

“When our experts observe patterns across sextortion attempts, like certain commonalities between scammers’ profiles, we train our technology to recognize these patterns”, Meta said in a statement. “This allows us to quickly find and take action against sextortion accounts, and to make significant progress in detecting both new and returning scammers”, it added.

The social media company also indicated that it will share aspects of these patterns with the Tech Coalition’s Lantern program, so that other companies can investigate their use on their own platforms.

This campaign follows Meta’s recent introduction of its Teen Account. It was designed to protect teens with built-in protections that limit who can contact them, the content they see and how much time they spend online.

Another key feature is that teens under 16 will need a parent’s permission to change any of the built-in protections to be less strict within Teen Accounts. If parents want more oversight over their older teen’s (16+) experiences, they simply have to turn on parental supervision. Then, they can approve any changes to these settings, irrespective of their teen’s age.

The feature will be available to teens in the EU later this year and in the rest of the world from January 2025.

Introducing the nudity protection feature

After announcing the test in April, Meta is now rolling out its nudity protection feature globally in Instagram DMs. The feature will also be enabled by default for teens under 18.

Nudity protection uses on-device machine learning to analyze whether an image sent in a DM on Instagram contains nudity. Because the images are analyzed on the device itself, nudity protection will work in end-to-end encrypted chats.

When someone receives an image containing nudity, it will be automatically blurred under a warning screen, meaning the recipient isn’t confronted with a nude image and they can choose whether or not to view it. It will also show them a message encouraging them not to feel pressure to respond, with an option to block the sender and report the chat. 

“We’ve also worked with Larry Magid at ConnectSafely to develop a video for parents, available on the Meta Family Center’s Stop Sextortion page, that explains how the feature works”, the company said.

Anyone who tries to forward a nude image they’ve received will see a message encouraging them to reconsider.