Meta is rolling out a flurry of teen safety features for Instagram, as the company faces growing questions about the privacy and safety of young users on its app. The latest batch of updates is meant to strengthen its protections against sextortion.
With the changes, Meta says it will make it harder for “potentially scammy” accounts to target teens on Instagram. The company will begin sending follow requests from such accounts to users’ spam folders or block them altogether.
The app will also begin testing an alert that notifies teens when they receive a message from such an account, warning them that the message is coming from another country.
Additionally, when the company detects that a potential scammer is already following a teen, it will block them from seeing the teen’s follower list and accounts that have tagged them in photos.
The company is not revealing how it is determining which accounts are considered “potentially scammy,” but a spokesperson said they are using signals such as the age of the account and whether or not it has mutual followers with the teen it is trying to interact with.
Meta is also making changes to prevent the spread of intimate images. Instagram will no longer allow users to screenshot or screen record images shared on DM through the app’s ephemeral messaging feature and will no longer allow these images to be opened from the web version of Instagram.
The app will also expand the nudity protection feature that began testing earlier this year to all teens on the app. This tool automatically blurs images when nudity is detected in an image shared on DM and provides warnings and resources when such an image is detected.
These changes are meant to address the reality of how sextortion scams, in which scammers force teens to send intimate photos that are used to threaten and blackmail them, are often carried out on Instagram.
A report from Thorn and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) earlier this year found that Instagram, along with Snapchat, were the “most common” platforms used by scammers as an “initial contact point.”
These scams are carried out by individuals and groups that sometimes organize on Meta’s own platform. Along with the updates, Meta said it removed 800 groups on Facebook and 820 accounts associated with a group called the Yahoo Boys that were “attempting to organize, recruit, and train new sextortion scammers.”
Meta’s updates come at a time when it’s facing growing pressure to strengthen safety features for its youngest users.
The company is currently facing lawsuits from more than 30 states over the issue. (Earlier this week, a federal judge rejected Meta’s attempt to dismiss the lawsuits.) New Mexico is also suing the company, alleging that Meta didn’t take enough steps to prevent teens from being sexually harassed on its apps, particularly Instagram.