Instagram warns teenagers against cybercrime

(Bloomberg) — Instagram is sending a video to millions of teens warning them about sextortion, a cybercrime that has spread on the app and in some cases driven young users to suicide.

The video, which opens with the phrase “Let’s talk about sextortion,” will be released to teens and young adults in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada on Thursday, Instagram parent company Meta Platforms said Inc., in a press release. The video highlights red flags to watch for – such as “someone coming on too strong” or asking to exchange explicit photos – and tells teens where to seek help.

The educational campaign is part of Meta’s efforts to combat sextortion, a crime in which scammers pose as teenage girls on social media apps like Instagram and Snap Inc.’s Snapchat to coerce their targets into sending nude photos . The perpetrators then blackmail the victims by threatening to forward these images to their friends and family, which the sextortionists find by browsing their followers and following lists on Instagram.

More than two dozen minors, mostly teenagers, have committed suicide after being blackmailed by sextortionists since 2022, according to an April investigation by Businessweek. Most of the scammers were based in Nigeria, home to cybercriminal networks such as Nigerian Princes and Yahoo Boys.

After the investigation was published, Meta, which also owns Facebook, purged more than 60,000 accounts in Nigeria linked to sextortionists using technology to identify suspicious profiles. Snap also announced that it was using technology to identify sextortionists and remove bad actors from its platform. Unlike Instagram, Snapchat hides its users’ friend lists, making it harder for sextortionists to blackmail their victims because they don’t know who their friends or family members are.

In its announcement Thursday, Meta said it was trying to further protect its platforms by preventing “potential fraudulent accounts” from accessing other users’ networks. If an account is flagged as suspicious, the company will automatically close access to followers and following lists on Instagram.

While these new features could help combat sextortion, critics say there’s a more effective solution: allowing teens to hide their subscribers and follow lists. Instagram does not have the ability to hide a user’s friends list from followers. So a scammer only needs to send a friend request to gain access to everyone the user is connected with.

Meta “could pretty much completely decimate this crime by hiding the subscribers and following list for all teens and making that the default,” said Paul Raffile, an independent intelligence analyst who has studied sextortion patterns for years . “We know this list is the primary source of influence used in sextortion scams. »

A Meta spokeswoman said the company tries to strike a balance between allowing teens to benefit from follow and follow lists to make it easier to discover new accounts, while protecting them from exploitation by bad actors . “We are constantly working to improve the techniques we use to identify scammers, remove their accounts, and prevent them from returning,” Meta said in the release.

Teens will receive a warning if they are contacted by someone in another country with whom they do not share common subscribers, Meta also announced, and said it is partnering with Crisis Text Line in the United States. United to deploy 24/7 live chat. feature allowing users to report child safety concerns. These new features build on the safety settings Meta announced for teens last month, including limiting who teens can contact and how much time they spend online.

Meta and other social media companies face hundreds of lawsuits from families, public school districts and state attorneys general who say the platforms have addicted young people, harmed their health mental and created a public nuisance. Earlier this week, a federal judge in California sided with 34 attorneys general in allowing certain lawsuits against Facebook and Meta’s Instagram. In these cases, the States allege that Meta knowingly contributed to a youth mental health crisis by getting children addicted to social media.

Meta, based in Menlo Park, Calif., said Tuesday it disagreed with the overall decision, pointing to recent changes to Instagram intended to protect teenage users, while welcoming the rejection of some claims under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. a longstanding federal law protecting internet companies from lawsuits.

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