New Tools to Help Protect Against Sextortion and Intimate Image Abuse

Financial sextortion is a horrific crime. We’ve spent years working carefully with consultants, together with these skilled in preventing these crimes, to perceive the techniques scammers use to discover and extort victims on-line, so we will develop efficient methods to assist cease them.
Today, we’re sharing an outline of our newest work to deal with these crimes. This consists of new instruments we’re testing to assist shield individuals from sextortion and different types of intimate picture abuse, and to make it as arduous as attainable for scammers to discover potential targets – on Meta’s apps and throughout the web. We’re additionally testing new measures to assist younger individuals in recognizing and defending themselves from sextortion scams.
These updates construct on our longstanding work to assist shield younger individuals from undesirable or doubtlessly dangerous contact. We default teenagers into stricter message settings to allow them to’t be messaged by anybody they’re not already linked to, present Safety Notices to teenagers who’re already in touch with potential rip-off accounts, and provide a devoted choice for individuals to report DMs which can be threatening to share personal pictures. We additionally supported the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in creating Take It Down, a platform that lets younger individuals take again management of their intimate pictures and helps forestall them being shared on-line – taking energy away from scammers.
Introducing Nudity Protection in DMs
While individuals overwhelmingly use DMs to share what they love with their pals, household or favourite creators, sextortion scammers may use personal messages to share or ask for intimate pictures. To assist deal with this, we’ll quickly begin testing our new nudity safety function in Instagram DMs, which blurs pictures detected as containing nudity and encourages individuals to suppose twice earlier than sending nude pictures. This function is designed not solely to shield individuals from seeing undesirable nudity of their DMs, but additionally to shield them from scammers who might ship nude pictures to trick individuals into sending their very own pictures in return.
Nudity safety shall be turned on by default for teenagers below 18 globally, and we’ll present a notification to adults encouraging them to flip it on.
When nudity safety is turned on, individuals sending pictures containing nudity will see a message reminding them to be cautious when sending delicate photographs, and that they will unsend these photographs in the event that they’ve modified their thoughts.

Anyone who tries to ahead a nude picture they’ve acquired will see a message encouraging them to rethink.

When somebody receives a picture containing nudity, it will likely be routinely blurred below a warning display, which means the recipient isn’t confronted with a nude picture and they will select whether or not or not to view it. We’ll additionally present them a message encouraging them not to really feel strain to reply, with an choice to block the sender and report the chat.
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When sending or receiving these pictures, individuals shall be directed to security suggestions, developed with steerage from consultants, in regards to the potential dangers concerned. These suggestions embrace reminders that individuals might screenshot or ahead pictures with out your data, that your relationship to the particular person might change sooner or later, and that you need to evaluate profiles rigorously in case they’re not who they are saying they’re. They additionally hyperlink to a spread of assets, together with Meta’s Safety Center, assist helplines, StopNCII.org for these over 18, and Take It Down for these below 18.
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Nudity safety makes use of on-device machine studying to analyze whether or not a picture despatched in a DM on Instagram accommodates nudity. Because the pictures are analyzed on the machine itself, nudity safety will work in end-to-end encrypted chats, the place Meta received’t have entry to these pictures – until somebody chooses to report them to us.
“Companies have a duty to make sure the safety of minors who use their platforms. Meta’s proposed device-side security measures inside its encrypted surroundings is encouraging. We are hopeful these new measures will enhance reporting by minors and curb the circulation of on-line youngster exploitation.” –John Shehan, Senior Vice President, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
“As an educator, mother or father, and researcher on adolescent on-line conduct, I applaud Meta’s new function that handles the change of private nude content material in a considerate, nuanced, and applicable approach. It reduces undesirable publicity to doubtlessly traumatic pictures, gently introduces cognitive dissonance to those that could also be open to sharing nudes, and educates individuals in regards to the potential downsides concerned. Each of those ought to assist lower the incidence of sextortion and associated harms, serving to to preserve younger individuals secure on-line.” –Dr. Sameer Hinduja, Co-Director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and Faculty Associate on the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.
Preventing Potential Scammers from Connecting with Teens
We take extreme motion after we develop into conscious of individuals partaking in sextortion: we take away their account, take steps to forestall them from creating new ones and, the place applicable, report them to the NCMEC and legislation enforcement. Our professional groups additionally work to examine and disrupt networks of those criminals, disable their accounts and report them to NCMEC and legislation enforcement – together with a number of networks within the final 12 months alone.
Now, we’re additionally creating know-how to assist determine the place accounts might doubtlessly be partaking in sextortion scams, based mostly on a spread of alerts that would point out sextortion conduct. While these alerts aren’t essentially proof that an account has damaged our guidelines, we’re taking precautionary steps to assist forestall these accounts from discovering and interacting with teen accounts. This builds on the work we already do to forestall different doubtlessly suspicious accounts from discovering and interacting with teenagers.
One approach we’re doing that is by making it even more durable for potential sextortion accounts to message or work together with individuals. Now, any message requests potential sextortion accounts attempt to ship will go straight to the recipient’s hidden requests folder, which means they received’t be notified of the message and by no means have to see it. For those that are already chatting to potential rip-off or sextortion accounts, we present Safety Notices encouraging them to report any threats to share their personal pictures, and reminding them that they will say no to something that makes them really feel uncomfortable.
For teenagers, we’re going even additional. We already limit adults from beginning DM chats with teenagers they’re not linked to, and in January we introduced stricter messaging defaults for teenagers below 16 (below 18 in sure international locations), which means they will solely be messaged by individuals they’re already linked to – irrespective of how previous the sender is. Now, we received’t present the “Message” button on a teen’s profile to potential sextortion accounts, even when they’re already linked. We’re additionally testing hiding teenagers from these accounts in individuals’s follower, following and like lists, and making it more durable for them to discover teen accounts in Search outcomes.
New Resources for People Who May Have Been Approached by Scammers
We’re testing new pop-up messages for individuals who might have interacted with an account we’ve eliminated for sextortion. The message will direct them to our expert-backed assets, together with our Stop Sextortion Hub, assist helplines, the choice to attain out to a good friend, StopNCII.org for these over 18, and Take It Down for these below 18.
We’re additionally including new youngster security helplines from all over the world into our in-app reporting flows. This means when teenagers report related points – similar to nudity, threats to share personal pictures or sexual exploitation or solicitation – we’ll direct them to native youngster security helplines the place out there.
Fighting Sextortion Scams Across the Internet
In November, we introduced we have been founding members of Lantern, a program run by the Tech Coalition that allows know-how firms to share alerts about accounts and behaviors that violate their youngster security insurance policies.
This trade cooperation is vital, as a result of predators don’t restrict themselves to only one platform – and the identical is true of sextortion scammers. These criminals goal victims throughout the completely different apps they use, usually shifting their conversations from one app to one other. That’s why we’ve began to share extra sextortion-specific alerts to Lantern, to construct on this vital cooperation and attempt to cease sextortion scams not simply on particular person platforms, however throughout the entire web.