Meta continues to roll out teen safety features for Instagram as the company faces growing questions about the privacy and safety of young users on its apps. The latest updates are to strengthen its protection against sextortion.
The changes, Meta says, will make it harder for “potentially fraudulent” accounts to target teenagers on Instagram. The company will start sending tracking requests from such accounts to users’ spam folders or block them completely. The app will also begin testing an alert that alerts teens when they receive a message from such an account and warns them that the message is from another country.
Additionally, if the company detects that a potential scammer is already following a teen, it will prevent them from viewing the teen’s follower lists and accounts that have tagged them in photos. The company doesn’t say exactly how it determines which accounts are considered “potentially fraudulent,” but a spokesperson said they use signals like the account’s age and whether it has mutual followers with the teen it’s trying to interact with.
The meta is also making changes to prevent the spread of intimate images. Instagram will no longer allow users to screenshot or record screenshots of images shared via DMs through the app’s ephemeral messaging feature, and will not allow those images to be opened from Instagram’s web version. The application will also expand the anti-spoof feature started testing to all teenagers in the app earlier this year. The tool automatically blurs images when nudity is detected shared over DMs and provides alerts and resources when such an image is detected.
The changes are meant to address the realities of how sextortion scams are often carried out over Instagram, where scammers coerce teenagers into sending intimate images, then use them to threaten and blackmail them. A report Thorn and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) found earlier this year that Instagram, along with Snapchat, was the “most common” platform used by fraudsters as “initial points of contact.”
These scams are sometimes carried out by individuals and groups organized on Meta own platforms. In addition to the updates, Meta said it deleted 800 Facebook groups and 820 accounts associated with a group known as the Yahoo Boys, which was “attempting to organize, recruit and train new sextortion fraudsters.”
The Meta updates come as it faces increasing pressure to beef up security features for its youngest users. Currently, the company is facing lawsuit from more than 30 states on the issue. (A federal judge earlier this week was rejected Meta’s attempt to dismiss the claim.) New Mexico also to sue company and claimed Meta hasn’t done enough to prevent adults from sexually harassing teenagers on its apps, especially Instagram.
