Meta (formerly Facebook) has rolled out a range of new safety features on Instagram in order to protect teens from ‘sextortion’ and make it even more difficult for sextortion criminals to succeed.
Meta new Instagram setting for safety
Instagram has implemented stricter message settings for teens under 18. These settings prevent them from being messaged by anyone they don’t follow or aren’t connected to, though follow requests can still be sent.
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Now, Instagram is adding further protection by making it harder for suspicious accounts, such as new or potentially scammy ones, to follow teens.
Depending on the risk, follow requests will either be blocked or sent to the teen’s spam folder.
Sextortion scammers often misrepresent where they live to trick teens into trusting them.
To help prevent this, Meta said that it is “testing new safety notices in Instagram DM and Messenger to let teens know when they’re chatting with someone who may be in a different country”.
Sextortion scammers often exploit their targets’ following and follower lists for blackmail.
To prevent this, accounts identified as showing scam-like behaviour will no longer be able to view people’s follower or following lists or see lists of accounts that have liked someone’s posts, tagged photos, or other tagged accounts.
This measure aims to reduce their ability to exploit these features for malicious purposes.
What are new features of Instagram to protect teens from sextortaion
Moreover, Meta mentioned that it will soon no longer allow people to use their device to directly screenshot or screen record ephemeral images or videos sent in private messages.
“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,” the tech giant said.
“We also won’t allow people to open ‘view once’ or ‘allow replay’ images or videos on the Instagram web, to avoid them circumventing this screenshot prevention,” it added.
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Further, Meta said that it is rolling out its ‘nudity protection’ feature globally in Instagram DMs.
These instagram safety features, enabled by default for teens under 18, will automatically blur images detected to contain nudity when sent or received in Instagram DMs. It will also warn users about the risks of sharing sensitive images.