Instagram said it’s deploying new new tools to protect young people and combat sexual extortion, including a feature that will automatically blur nudity in direct messages.
The social media platform said in a blog post Thursday that it’s testing out the features as part of its campaign to fight sexual scams and other forms of “image abuse,” and to make it tougher for criminals to contact teens.
Sexual extortion, or sextortion, involves persuading a person to send explicit photos online and then threatening to make the images public unless the victim pays money or engages in sexual favors. Recent high-profile cases include two Nigerian brothers who pleaded guilty to sexually extorting teen boys and young men in Michigan, including one who took his own life, and a Virginia sheriff’s deputy who sexually extorted and kidnapped a 15-year-old girl.
Instagram and other social media companies have faced growing criticism for not doing enough to protect young people. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Instagram’s owner Meta Platforms, apologized to the parents of victims of such abuse during a Senate hearing earlier this year.
Meta also owns Facebook and WhatsApp but the nudity blur feature won’t be added to messages sent on those platforms.
Instagram said scammers often use direct messages to ask for “intimate images.” To counter this, it will soon start testing out a nudity protection feature for direct messages that blurs any images with nudity “and encourages people to think twice before sending nude images.”
Read more here from the Associated Press.
