‘Let’s Talk About Sextortion’: Instagram Warns Teens of Cybercrime

(Bloomberg) -- 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.

The video, which opens with the line “Let’s talk about sextortion,” 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. The video highlights red flags to watch for — such as “someone coming on too strong” or asking to trade explicit photos — and directs teens where to seek help.

The educational campaign is part of Meta’s effort to fight sextortion, a crime where scammers pose as teen girls on social media apps like Instagram and Snap Inc.’s Snapchat to coerce their targets into sending nude photos. 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.

More than two dozen minors, mainly teen boys, have killed themselves after being blackmailed by sextortionists since 2022, an April Businessweek investigation found. Many of the scammers were based in Nigeria, home to cyber-criminal networks like the Nigerian Princes and Yahoo Boys.

After the investigation was published, Meta, which also owns Facebook, purged more than 60,000 accounts in Nigeria linked to sextortionists by using technology to identify suspicious profiles. Snap also announced it was using technology to identify sextortionists and remove bad actors from its platform. Unlike Instagram, Snapchat hides the friends’ lists of its users, making it harder for sextortionists to blackmail victims because they don’t know who their friends or family members are.

In its announcement Thursday, Meta said it was attempting to further safeguard its platforms by blocking “potential scammy accounts” from seeing the networks of other users. If an account is flagged as suspicious, the company will automatically shut down access to followers and following lists on Instagram.

While these new features may help curb sextortion, critics say there’s a more effective solution: letting teens hide their followers and following lists. Instagram has no option to hide a user’s list of friends from followers. So a scammer just needs to send a friend request in order to access everyone that user is connected with.

Meta “could pretty much decimate this crime completely by hiding the followers and following list for all teens and making that the default,” said Paul Raffile, an independent intelligence analyst who has studied sextortion patterns for years. “We know this list is the No. 1 source of leverage used in sextortion scams.”

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’s easy to discover new accounts, while protecting them from exploitation by bad actors. 

“These are important for connecting and finding the people you are interested in and we want to protect those valuable features for enjoying the app, but we want to make sure they cannot be exploited by these scammers,” Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Thursday.

Teens will receive a warning if they are contacted by someone in another country who they don’t 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. These new features build on the safety settings Meta announced for teens last month, including limiting who can contact teens and how much time they spend online.

The changes come as the crime of sextortion itself changes, Davis said. “It is moving to become a financial crime as more people ask for more money, and within that there is a spike of this across the internet.”

Meta and other social media companies face hundreds of lawsuits from families, public school districts and state attorneys general, which claim the platforms have addicted young people, harmed their mental health and created a public nuisance. Earlier this week, a federal judge in California sided with 34 attorneys general in allowing some claims against Meta’s Facebook and Instagram to proceed. In those cases, the states allege Meta knowingly contributed to a youth mental health crisis by getting kids hooked on social media. 

Menlo Park, California-based Meta on Tuesday said it disagreed with the overall ruling, pointing to its recent changes to Instagram meant to protect teenage users, while saying it welcomes the dismissal of some of the claims under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a longstanding federal law shielding internet companies from lawsuits.

--With assistance from Paayal Zaveri.

(Updates with quotes from Bloomberg Television in the 10th paragraph)

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