Instagram is sending a video to millions of teenagers to warn them about sextortion, a cybercrime that has proliferated on the app and in some cases has driven young users to suicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The video, which opens with the line \u201cLet\u2019s talk about sextortion,\u201d will be pushed to teens and young adults in the US, the UK and Canada on Thursday, Instagram parent company Meta Platforms Inc. said in a statement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The video highlights red flags to watch for \u2014 such as \u201csomeone coming on too strong\u201d or asking to trade explicit photos \u2014 and directs teens where to seek help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The educational campaign is part of Meta\u2019s effort to fight sextortion, a crime where scammers pose as teen girls on social media apps like Instagram and Snap’s Snapchat to coerce their targets into sending nude photos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The perpetrators then blackmail victims by threatening to forward those images to their friends and family, whom sextortionists find by scrolling through their followers and following lists on Instagram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More than two dozen minors, mainly teen boys, have killed themselves after being blackmailed by sextortionists since 2022, an April\u00a0Businessweek<\/a>\u00a0investigation found. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of the scammers were based in Nigeria, home to cyber-criminal networks like the Nigerian Princes and Yahoo Boys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the investigation was published, Meta, which also owns Facebook,\u00a0purged more than 60,000 accounts<\/a>\u00a0in Nigeria linked to sextortionists by using technology to identify suspicious profiles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Snap also announced it was using technology to identify sextortionists and remove bad actors from its platform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike Instagram, Snapchat hides the friends\u2019 lists of its users, making it harder for sextortionists to blackmail victims because they don\u2019t know who their friends or family members are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In its announcement Thursday, Meta said it was attempting to further safeguard its platforms by blocking \u201cpotential scammy accounts\u201d from seeing the networks of other users. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If an account is flagged as suspicious, the company will automatically shut down access to followers and following lists on Instagram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While these new features may help curb sextortion, critics say there\u2019s a more effective solution: letting teens hide their followers and following lists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Instagram has no option to hide a user\u2019s list of friends from followers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So a scammer just needs to send a friend request in order to access everyone that user is connected with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meta \u201ccould pretty much decimate this crime completely by hiding the followers and following list for all teens and making that the default,\u201d said\u00a0Paul Raffile<\/a>, an independent intelligence analyst who has studied sextortion patterns for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe know this list is the No. 1 source of leverage used in sextortion scams.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Meta spokeswoman said the company is trying to strike a balance between allowing teens to benefit from the following and follower lists so it\u2019s easy to discover new accounts, while protecting them from exploitation by bad actors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThese are important for connecting and finding the people you are interested in and we want to protect those valuable features for enjoying the app,” Antigone Davis, Meta\u2019s global head of safety, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Thursday. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “We want to make sure they cannot be exploited by these scammers.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Teens will receive a warning if they are contacted by someone in another country who they don\u2019t share mutual followers with, Meta also announced, and said it is teaming up with Crisis Text Line in the US to roll out a 24\/7 live chat function for users to report child safety issues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n