Meta’s Instagram has announced new security measures to protect people on its platform from sextortion scams.
Sextortion is a crime where scammers threated to expose intimate imagery of their victims if they do not comply with the criminal’s demands, typically financial payment.
These features included hiding follower and following lists from potential sextortion scammers, preventing screenshots of certain images in direct messages (DMs) and rolling out our nudity protection feature globally.
Meta is also working on an awareness campaign with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Thorn, a non-profit defending children from sexual exploitation and abuse, to develop an educational video that helps teens recognize signs that someone may be a sextortion scammer.
“The dramatic rise in sextortion scams is taking a heavy toll on children and teens, with reports of online enticement increasing by over 300% from 2021 to 2023,” said John Shehan, a Senior Vice President of NCMEC.
Instagram Launches Teen Accounts with Built-in Protections
The news comes as the social media platform launched Instagram Teen Accounts with built-in protections for young adults.
The Teen Accounts will be private accounts by default, meaning people who do not follow the accounts cannot see their content or interact with them.
Also, teens will be placed in the strictest messaging settings, so they can only be messaged by people they follow or are already connected to.
The new features also look to tackle the time teens spend on social media via a notification telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day and enabling sleep mode between 10pm and 7am which will mute notifications and send auto-replies to direct messages.
Teens under 16 will need a parent’s permission to change any of the built-in protections to be less strict within Teen Accounts.
“Instagram Teen Accounts reflect the importance of tailoring teens’ online experiences to their developmental stages and implementing appropriate protections. Younger adolescents are more vulnerable as their skills are still emerging and require additional safeguards and protection. Overall, the settings are age-specific, with younger and older teens being offered different protections,” commented Rachel Rodgers, PhD Associate Professor of Applied Psychology, Northeastern University in a statement issued by Instagram.
Parents will also have more insights via the supervision feature which will allow them to see who their teen has messaged, set daily time limits for Instagram usage and see topics teens are looking at.
A past criticism of initiatives like this have centered around age verification, as many teens will lie about their age to circumnavigate restrictions.
Instagram said it is now requiring teens to verify their age in more places. It is also building new technology which will proactively find accounts belonging to teens, even if the account lists an adult birthday. This change is set to begin in 2025 in the US.
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