Instagram doubles down on sextortion

Meta is releasing new safety features for its social media platform Instagram, designed to protect people from sextortion – a crime involving the extortion of money or sexual favours by threatening to expose evidence of someone’s sexual activity.

To prevent suspicious accounts from connecting with teens, Instagram will now assess accounts for signs of potentially scam behaviour before allowing them to request to follow younger users. Based on factors such as how new the account is, the follow request may either be blocked outright or directed to a teen’s spam folder.

Sextortion scammers often exploit the following and follower lists of their targets to blackmail them. In response, Instagram will now restrict accounts flagged as suspicious from viewing people’s follower or following lists, limiting their ability to misuse these features. Additionally, these accounts will no longer be able to view lists of users who liked a post, photos a user has been tagged in, or accounts tagged in their photos.

Soon, Instagram will also block the ability to take screenshots or screen recordings of disappearing images and videos sent in messages. If users send a photo or video via Instagram DM or Messenger using the ‘view once’ or ‘allow replay’ option, they can be assured it won’t be saved without their consent. Additionally, ‘view once’ or ‘allow replay’ media will no longer be accessible on Instagram’s web version, further preventing screenshot circumvention.

Instagram is improving techniques to identify scammers, remove their accounts, and prevent their return. By analysing patterns across sextortion attempts – such as recurring traits in scammers’ profiles – the app trains its technology to recognise these indicators. This enables quick action against sextortion accounts, enhancing detection of both new and returning scammers. Key insights into these patterns are also shared with the Tech Coalition’s Lantern program.

Further teen protection

Instagram is now rolling out its nudity protection feature globally in DMs, following initial tests in April. Enabled by default for users under 18, this feature blurs images containing nudity when detected in DMs and provides a warning about the risks of sending sensitive images. To support parents, Instagram has collaborated with Larry Magid at ConnectSafely to create an informative video available on the Meta Family Center’s Stop Sextortion page, explaining how the feature works.

This campaign and these new safety features complement the recently announced Teen Accounts, providing built-in protections for millions of teens. These protections limit contact, control content visibility, and help manage time spent online. For teens under 16, any changes to Teen Account settings require parental permission.

With Instagram Teen Accounts, stricter messaging settings are applied by default for users under 18, ensuring they cannot be messaged by anyone they don’t follow or aren’t connected to. Teen Accounts will roll out in Europe later this year and will be available globally from January 2025.

Taking action against sextortion criminals  

Early this month, approximately 1,600 Facebook Groups and accounts associated with Yahoo Boys were removed after attempting to organise, recruit, and train new scammers. This follows a similar action in July, when around 7,200 Facebook assets were removed for comparable activities.

Yahoo Boys are banned under Meta’s Dangerous Organisations and Individuals policy, one of the platform’s strictest policies, which mandates the removal of their accounts engaged in criminal activity upon detection. While these removals have been ongoing for years, new processes are now being implemented to expedite the identification and removal of these accounts.

* Visit Meta’s ‘Stop Sextortion’ page here.