Meta-owned platform, Instagram has announced a range of new safety features designed to protect young users from sextortion.
In an update, Instagram stated that the features include hiding followers from potential sextortion scammers.
“Today, we’re announcing new measures in our fight against these criminals – including new safety features to further help prevent sextortion on our apps, building on protections already in place,” read the statement in part.
“These updates, which are part of a campaign informed by National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Thorn & Childnet, also aim to help parents feel more equipped to support their teens in avoiding these scams.”
Sextortion is a trend where financially driven scammers target young adults and teens around the world, threatening to expose their intimate imagery if they don’t get what they want.
Instagram Introduces Safety Features to Stop Sextortion
The Meta platform mentioned that the features will make it harder for accounts showing signs of being scammers 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,” it added.
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Moving forward, Instagram will restrict accounts that display signs of the behavior from accessing people’s followers or following lists, effectively removing their ability to exploit this feature.
These potential sextorters will also not 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.
Instagram has also stated that it is continually enhancing its techniques to identify scammers, remove their accounts, and prevent their return.
This will enable the platform to swiftly locate and take action against sextortion accounts, making significant strides in detecting both new and returning scammers.
No Screenshots of Certain Images
Additionally, Instagram will introduce features to prevent screenshots of certain images in Direct Messages (DMs).
Once implemented, users will not be able to use their devices to directly screenshot or screen record ephemeral images or videos sent in messages.
This means that if someone shares a photo or video in Instagram DM or Messenger using the “view once” or “allow replay” feature, they won’t need to worry about it being screenshotted or recorded in-app without their consent.
Instagram added that users will also not be able to open “view once” or “allow replay” images or videos on the Instagram web to avoid circumventing the screenshot prevention.
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Nudity Protection Feature
After announcing the test in April, the app is rolling out its nudity protection feature globally in Instagram DMs.
This feature, which will be enabled by default for users under 18, will blur images detected to contain nudity when sent or received in Instagram DMs and will warn users about the risks of sending sensitive images.
Instagram has collaborated with Larry Magid at ConnectSafely to create a video for parents, available on the Meta Family Center’s Stop Sextortion page, explaining how the feature works.
These new safety features are part of Meta’s recent announcement regarding Teen Accounts, which provide built-in protection for tens of millions of teens, limiting who can contact them, the content they can see, and how much time they spend online.
Teens under 16 will not be able to change Teen Account settings without parental permission.
With Instagram Teen Accounts, users under 18 will automatically have stricter messaging settings, meaning they cannot be messaged by anyone they do not follow or are not connected to.
In the EU, Instagram plans to start transitioning teens to Teen Accounts later this year, with availability for the rest of the world beginning in January.
Last week, Meta removed around 1,600 Facebook Groups and accounts that were affiliated with Yahoo Boys, and were attempting to organize, recruit and train new scammers.
This comes after they announced in July that they’d removed around 7,200 Facebook assets that were engaging in similar behavior.
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