Instagram Begins Blurring Nudity In Messages To Protect Teens And Fight Sexual Extortion

LONDON — Instagram claims it’s launching new tools to safeguard young people and against sexual extortion, including one that automatically blurs nudity in direct messages.

The social media platform stated in a blog post on Thursday that it is testing the features as part of its campaign to combat sexual fraud and other forms of “image abuse,” as well as to make it more difficult for criminals to contact teenagers.

Instagram Begins Blurring Nudity In Messages To Protect Teens And Fight Sexual Extortion

Sexual extortion, often known as sextortion, is the practice of enticing someone to transmit graphic photos online and then threatening to make the images public unless the victim pays money or does sexual favors. Recent high-profile incidents include two Nigerian brothers who pleaded guilty to sexually extorting teenage boys and young men in Michigan, one of whom committed suicide, and a Virginia sheriff’s officer who sexually extorted and kidnapped a 15-year-old girl.

Instagram and other social media platforms have come under fire for failing to adequately protect young people. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms, apologized to the parents of victims of such abuse during a Senate hearing earlier this year.

Meta, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, but the nudity blur feature will not be introduced to communications sent through those services.

Instagram claimed scammers frequently use direct messages to request “intimate images.” To address this, it will soon begin testing a nudity-protection function for direct messages that blurs any photographs containing nudity “and encourages people to think twice before sending nude images.”

“The feature is designed not only to protect people from seeing unwanted nudity in their DMs, but also to protect them from scammers who may send nude images to trick people into sending their own images in return,” Instagram stated in a statement.

For all teenagers under the age of 18, the option will be by default enabled. Adults will receive a notification inviting them to activate it.

Images containing nudity will be obscured with a warning, allowing users to choose to view them. They will also be able to block the sender and report the communication.

Instagram Begins Blurring Nudity In Messages To Protect Teens And Fight Sexual Extortion

People who send direct messages with nudity will receive a notice asking them to exercise caution while sending “sensitive photos.” They’ll also be told that they can unsend the photographs if they change their minds, but there’s a risk others have already seen them.

Instagram claimed it is developing technologies to help detect accounts that may be involved in sexual extortion scams “based on a range of signals that could indicate sextortion behavior.”

To prevent criminals from engaging with young people, it is also implementing safeguards such as not presenting the “message” button on a teen’s profile to potential sextortion accounts, even if they already follow one other, and developing novel techniques to hide teenagers from these accounts.

Instagram Begins Blurring Nudity In Messages To Protect Teens And Fight Sexual Extortion

In January, the FBI warned of a “huge increase” in sextortion instances involving children, particularly financial sextortion, in which someone threatens to expose compromising photographs unless the victim pays. The intended victims are often guys aged 14 to 17, although the FBI says any child can become a victim. In the six months from October 2022 to March 2023, the FBI reported more than 20% more financially motivated sextortion instances involving child victims than in the same time the previous year.

SOURCE – (AP)