Instagram rolls out new safety features to protect teens from sextortion

Instagram is introducing a series of new safety features to protect users from sextortion scammers, the company announced on Thursday. Most notably, the company is no longer going to allow people to screenshot or screen record ephemeral images or videos sent in private messages.

Up until now, you have been able to screenshot ephemeral content in Instagram DMs (direct messages), but the other person would be notified that you saved it. With this change, if you send someone a photo or video via DMs using the “view once” or “allow replay” features, the other person won’t be able to save the content. Plus, Instagram won’t let people open “view once” or “allow replay” images or videos on the desktop to ensure that they can’t circumvent the safety measures. 

By preventing users from taking screenshots of ephemeral content, Instagram is taking things a step further than Snapchat when it comes to making sure ephemeral content remains that way. On Snapchat, if you send someone an image, they are allowed to screenshot it. While Snapchat does notify the user that their image was saved, the app doesn’t do anything to prevent users from taking screenshots of ephemeral content in the first place.

Instagram, on the other hand, is now ensuring that content meant to be viewed once can, in fact, only be viewed once.

The Meta-owned social network says the new features announced today complement the recent launch of Teen Accounts, which automatically enroll young users into an app experience with built-in protections that limit who can contact them.

With Teen Accounts, young users can’t receive messages from anyone they don’t follow or aren’t connected to, but they can still receive follow requests from anyone. Now, Instagram is making it harder for suspicious accounts, like those that were recently created, to request to follow teens.

Depending on how scammy an account appears, Instagram will either block the follow request entirely or send it to a teen’s spam folder. 

The app is also rolling out safety notices in DMs to let teens know when they’re talking to someone who might live in a different country. The company says it’s doing so because sextortion scammers often lie about where they live in order to get teens to trust them. 

Since sextortion scammers often use a teen’s following and follower lists to try to blackmail them, Instagram is going to prevent accounts depicting scammy behavior from seeing people’s following and follower lists. These accounts also won’t be able to see who has liked someone’s post or see which photos they have been tagged in.

In addition, Instagram is fully rolling out its nudity protection feature globally after first testing it starting in April. The safety measure automatically blurs images that contain nudity in DMs. The feature will be enabled by default for teen users. As for the people sending them, Instagram will warn them of the risks involved with sending private photos.

To provide more support within its app, Instagram is partnering with Crisis Text Line in the U.S. Now, when a user reports an issue related to child safety or sextortion, they will see an option to talk to a crisis counselor. 

The changes come ten months after Instagram, alongside other major social networks, was grilled by lawmakers for not doing enough to protect young users on its platform.

As part of its efforts to fight sextortion, Instagram is going to start showing users an educational video about sextortion scammers to teens in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. The social network is also partnering with influencers like Bella Poarch and Brent Rivera to create content about spotting sextortion and what to do if it happens.