Instagram adds new safeguards to protect teens from sextortion

Instagram is launching several new features designed to protect teens from sextortion scams, which occur when scammers threaten to share intimate images of their victims unless they receive payment or more photos.

A soon-to-be-rolled-out guardrail will prevent people from taking screenshots or recording disappearing images or videos sent in a private message. If the sender allows the image or video to be replayed, Instagram will prevent users from opening them on the web. However, this will not prevent fraudsters from capturing the image or video by saving it with another device.

Starting today, Instagram will start using certain indicators, such as how new an account is, to also detect fraudulent behavior. The platform will then prevent these accounts from sending follow requests to teens by blocking their request or moving it to the teen’s spam folder.

The company is also testing a safety advisory on Instagram and Messenger that will alert teens if the person they are talking to is in another country, because sextortion scammers often lie about their location.

Additionally, Instagram will now begin blocking suspicious accounts from viewing their victims’ following or following lists, which sextortion scammers can use for blackmail purposes. Similarly, Instagram will prevent suspicious accounts from seeing lists of accounts that have liked a target’s posts, the photos they are tagged in, and other users tagged in their photos.

To protect children from viewing obscene photos, Instagram is launching a feature that will automatically detect and blur nude images for users under 18 years old. Instagram began testing this filter in April and it will be enabled by default for teens around the world. Other safety measures coming to the platform include an option to chat with the Crisis Text Line in the United States if users report sextortion or child safety concerns. It will also screen an educational video aimed at teenagers in the US, UK, Canada and Australia to raise awareness about sextortion scams, which are on the rise.

This suite of features is part of Meta’s broader efforts to make its platforms safer for children. Last month, Instagram announced that it would begin putting all teens into more private accounts with certain security settings enabled by default, like restricted DMs and sleep mode to silence notifications at night.