Knowledge Base Article

🚨 New Sextortion Safety Features on Meta: What Parents Need To Know

Meta just released another installment of safety features built in an effort to prevent teen sextortion on the platform. 

In an effort to tighten its protections against sextortion, Meta is cracking down on "potentially scammy" accounts that try to connect with teens on Instagram.  

These features come as part of an ongoing effort to better handle younger users’ privacy and safety on Meta platforms. A report conducted by Thorn & the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) earlier this year found that Instagram, along with Snapchat, were the “most common” platforms used by scammers “as initial contact points”  for sextortion crimes. 

To combat this, Meta rolled out several new features targeted at accounts they deem “potentially scammy”.

Here’s what’s new:

  • Any follow requests from what the app identifies as a “potentially scammy” account will be sent straight to users’ spam folders or be blocked entirely. 
  • Teens will be alerted when they receive a message from such an account, warning them that the message may have come from a different country. 
  • When the app detects that these types of  accounts are already following a teen, they will be prevented from viewing the teens’ follower list and accounts that have tagged them in photos. 
  • Other key updates include:
    • The app will no longer allow users to screenshot or screen record from their ephemeral messaging feature and will no longer allow these images to be opened from the web version of Instagram.
    • The app will expand the nudity protection tool that it began testing earlier this year, now to all teens on the app. The tool automatically blurs images when nudity is detected in an image shared over DMs, and provides warnings & resources when such an image is detected. 
Source: Meta

What do you think? Are these a step in the right direction?

Updated 5 months ago
Version 4.0
No CommentsBe the first to comment