Instagram to crack down on teen sextortion

Instagram is aiming to make it harder for potential scammers and criminals to coerce teens into sending nude photos and extort them for money.

Instagram is aiming to make it harder for potential scammers and criminals to coerce teens into sending nude photos and extort them for money. The company announced on Thursday it is testing new features to curb an alarming trend called financial sextortion, which often targets kids and teenagers. Once the nude images are sent, the scammers claim they’ll post them online, either on public websites or on newsfeeds where their friends will see, unless the victims send money or gift cards. In the upcoming weeks and among a subset of users, Instagram said it will roll out various new features, such as blurring nude images sent in direct messages and informing users when they’ve interacted with someone who engaged in financial sextortion. The tools will come to all users worldwide soon after. “It is a really horrific crime that preys on making people feel alone and ashamed,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s director of global safety, told CNN. “It’s been well documented that the crime is growing, and this is one of the reasons that we want to get out ahead and make sure people are aware of what we’re doing as we continually evolve our tools.” Non-consensual sharing of nude images has been a problem for years, typically among people who seek revenge on victims they know personally. But the FBI recently said it has seen an increase in financial sextortion cases from strangers, often started by scammers overseas. In some cases, sextortion has resulted in suicide. Meta’s latest tools build on Meta’s existing, related teen safety features, including strict settings that prevent messaging between non-connected accounts, an increase in safety notices and an option to report DMs that threaten to share or request intimate images. Last year, Meta teamed up with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to develop Take It Down, a platform that lets young people create a unique digital fingerprint for explicit images they want taken down from the internet.