Instagram rolls out new measures to protect people from sextortion

Meta-owned Instagram has announced new measures to further protect people from sextortion, including hiding followers and following lists from potential sextortion scammers.

Sextortion is a horrific crime where financially driven scammers target online users. They then persuade the victim to share nude images or videos of themselves, and then they start making demands and threaten to expose their intimate imagery if they don’t get what they want.

Meta said the new safety measures build on protections already in place making it even harder for sextortion criminals to succeed.

Sextortion on Instagram

“We are 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 follow request completely, or send it to a teen’s spam folder.”

Sextortion scammers often use the following and followers lists of their targets to try and blackmail them.

Meta said accounts it detects 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.”

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No screenshots

Meta said it is also working on a feature that will no longer allow people to use their device to directly screenshot or screen record ephemeral 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.

“We also won’t allow people to open ‘view once’ or ‘allow replay’ images or videos on Instagram web, to avoid them circumventing screenshot prevention,” Meta said.

Nudity protection

After first announcing the test in April, Meta is now rolling out its nudity protection feature globally for Instagram DMs.

“This feature, which will be enabled by default for teens under 18, will blur images that we detect contain nudity when sent or received in Instagram DMs and will warn people of the risks associated with sending sensitive images.

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

Meta’s new safety features are in addition to its recent announcement of Teen Accounts, which gives tens of millions of teens built-in protections that limit who can contact them, the content they see and how much time they’re spending online.

Teens under 16 aren’t able to change Teen Account settings without a parent’s permission.

Taking action

Last week, Meta said it removed around 1,600 Facebook Groups and accounts that were affiliated with Yahoo Boys, and were attempting to organise, recruit and train new scammers.

In July, Meta removed around 7,200 Facebook assets that were engaging in similar behaviour.

“Yahoo Boys are banned under Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy — one of our strictest policies — which means we remove Yahoo Boys’ accounts engaged in this criminal activity whenever we become aware of them.

“While we’ve been removing violating Yahoo Boys accounts for years, we’re putting new processes in place which will allow us to identify and remove these accounts more quickly,” Mata said.

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