Instagram Unveils New Safety Features to Protect Teens, Young Adults

By Aduragbemi Omiyale

New security features have been added to Instagram to protect users of the social media platform, particularly teenagers and young adults, from sextortion.

The new updates, which are part of a campaign informed by NCMEC, Thorn & Childnet, also aim to help parents feel more equipped to support their teens in avoiding these scams.

Sextortion is a horrific crime, where financially driven scammers target young adults and teens around the world, threatening to expose their intimate imagery if they don’t get what they want.

Under the new measures, users can hide follower and following lists from potential scammers, preventing screenshots of certain images in DMs.

In a statement, Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, said it wants to make it harder for accounts showing signals of potentially scammy behaviour to request to follow teens.

Depending on the strength of these signals – which include how new an account is – the platform will either block the following request completely or send it to a teen’s spam folder.

“Soon, we’ll 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 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.

“We also won’t allow people to open ‘view once’ or ‘allow replay’ images or videos on the Instagram web, to avoid them circumventing screenshot prevention,” it added.

Instagram stated that it’s constantly working to improve the techniques we use to identify scammers, remove their accounts and stop them from coming back.

“When our experts observe patterns across sextortion attempts, like certain commonalities between scammers’ profiles, we train our technology to recognize these patterns. This allows us to quickly find and take action against sextortion accounts, and to make significant progress in detecting both new and returning scammers.

“We’re also sharing aspects of these patterns with the Tech Coalition’s Lantern program so that other companies can investigate their use on their platforms.”

Meta stated that last week, it removed around 1,600 Facebook Groups and accounts affiliated with Yahoo Boys, and attempted to organize, recruit and train new scammers.

Recall that in July, the platform yanked off around 7,200 Facebook assets engaging in similar behaviour.