Meta said Thursday Instagram is launching a new campaign to help teens and their parents avoid sextortion and fight the financially-driven scammers who prey on teens and children. File Photo by Terry Schmitt/UPI | License Photo
Meta said Thursday Instagram is launching a new campaign to help teens and their parents avoid sextortion and fight the financially-driven scammers who prey on teens and children.
“Sextortion is a horrific crime, 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,” Meta said in a statement Thursday. “Today, we’re announcing new measures in our fight against these criminals — including an education campaign to raise awareness among teens and parents about how to spot sextortion scams, and what to do to take back control if they’re targeted by one of these scams.” Advertisement
The new measures include hiding follower and following lists from potential sextortion scammers, preventing screenshots of certain images in direct messages and globally rolling out a previously tested nudity protection feature. Advertisement
Sextortion is extortion of money by threatening to publicly reveal intimate imagery of teens and even children. Victims are tricked into sending those images to the scammers.
“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. Campaigns like this bring much-needed education to help families recognize these threats early,” National Center for Missing & Exploited Children Senior Vice President John Shehan said in a statement.
Meta is providing a link to NCMEC’s Take It Down Tool that helps prevent intimate images from being shared online. A video is being provided that helps teens affected by sextortion scams.
The video will be shown to millions of teens and young adults on Instagram in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia.
Meta said last week 800 Facebook Groups and 820 accounts affiliated with Yahoo Boys were taken down. Meta said that group “were attempting to organize, recruit and train new sextortion scammers.”
Yahoo Boys are banned for being a dangerous organization under Meta policies.
Part of the effort to counter sextortion are partnerships Meta is forming with creators popular with teens in order to raise awareness of the sextortion threat. Advertisement
The creators will be part of a campaign against sextortion.
The anti-sextortion campaign includes new safety features within Meta’s apps designed to protect teen users from sextortion.
These include teen accounts that come with built-in protections with limits on who can contact them. Teens under 16 can’t change those protective elements without a parent’s permission.
“Soon, we’ll no longer allow people to use their device to directly screenshot or screen record ephemeral images or videos sent in private messages,” Meta’s Thursday statement said. “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.”
A nudity protection feature Meta tested in April is being rolled out globally. It blurs images that are detected as nudity in Instagram DMs and is enabled by default for teens under 18.
A Crisis Text Line operating 24/7 will also offer confidential mental health support for issues related to sextortion.
Meta is testing new DM and Messenger safety notices that alert teens if they are chatting with someone in a different country.
“We’re constantly working to improve the techniques we use to identify scammers, remove their accounts and stop them from coming back,” Meta said. Advertisement
In July Meta took down 63,000 Nigerian Instagram accounts to fight sextortion and removed Facebook accounts, Pages and Groups it said were operated by Yahoo Boys, described by Meta as a loosely organized group of cybercriminals operating largely from Nigeria.
