Instagram unveils new features to protect teens from sextortion scams

In an effort to protect teens from sextortion scams, Meta's Instagram has introduced a range of new safety features.

The new features make it harder for accounts showing signs of potential scam to request to follow teens. Depending on the strength of these signals, such as how new an account is, Instagram will either block the follow request completely or send it to the teen's spam folder.

Instagram will also remove their ability to see the following and follower lists of an account. This is so that potential sextortors won't be able to see the list of accounts that have liked someone's posts, photos they've been tagged in or other accounts that they have tagged in their photos. 

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Instagram will also let teens know when they are chatting with someone who may be based in a different country. This is especially since sextortion scammers often misrepresent where they live to trick teens into trusting them. 

Soon, Meta will also no longer allow people to use their device to directly screenshot or screen record ephemeral images or videos sent in messages.

This means that if someone sends a photo or video in Instagram direct messages (DMs) or Facebook Messenger using the ‘view once’ or ‘allow replay’ feature, the user won't need to worry about it being screenshotted or recorded in-app without consent.

At the same time, Meta won’t allow people to open ‘view once’ or ‘allow replay’ images or videos on Instagram web, to avoid scammers circumventing screenshot prevention.

In addition, after first announcing the test in April, Meta will be rolling out its nudity protection feature globally in Instagram DMs. This feature, which will be enabled by default for teens under 18, will blur images that contains nudity when sent or received in Instagram DMs and will warn people of the risks associated with sending sensitive images.

Earlier in August, it was reported that Meta and Google made a secret deal to target 13- to 17-year-olds with Instagram ads on YouTube. This breaks the search giant's rules against advertising to children, according to the Financial Times. 

According to Financial Times, the Instagram campaign "deliberately targeted a group of users labelled as 'unknown' in its advertising system".

It added that Google knew 'unknown' skewed towards under-18s and that documents seen by the publication suggested "steps were taken to ensure the true intent of the campaign was disguised." 

When MARKETING-INTERACTIVE reached out at the time, Google said it "prohibit ads being personalised to people under 18, period. These policies go well beyond what is required and are supported by technical safeguards. We've confirmed that these safeguards worked properly here. We'll also be taking additional action to reinforce with sales representatives that they must not help advertisers or agencies run campaigns attempting to work around our policies.”

Meta, on the other hand, reportedly said that it has been open about marketing its apps to young people as a place for them to connect with friends, find community and discover their interests, reported Financial Times.  

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