Meta’s latest Instagram safety campaign promises to help teens and parents combat social media sextortion. Critics say its too little, too late.

Sextortion occurs when a scammer threatens to expose a victim’s nude images unless they pay up. Until recently, these scammers primarily targeted women and girls, coercing them provide sexual or relational favors in exchange for privacy.

Since 2021, however, child advocates and law enforcement agencies have tracked a sharp increase in financial sextortion reports. Unlike traditional sextortion, financial sextortionists exploit victims — usually teenage boys — for money.

Social media makes it easy for scammers to pose as an attractive peer and propose exchanging nude photos. But a recent analysis of sextortion incidents filed with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) between August 2020 and August 2023 specifically implicates Meta as an enabler of such crimes.

The analysis found almost half (45%) of sextortionists began interacting with their victims on Instagram. More than 90% of scammers who threatened to distribute sensitive photos threatened to do so over Meta apps — 60% over Instagram and 33% over Facebook.

Most distressingly, 81% of all reported leaks of private images by sextortionists took place on Instagram.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation put Meta on their annual list of online entities “facilitating, enabling and even profiting from sexual abuse and exploitation” for reasons like these, writing:

Meta’s platforms—Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp — have consistently been ranked for years as the top hotspots for a host of crimes and harms: pedophile networks sharing child sex abuse material, where CSAM offenders first contact children, exploitative algorithms promoting children to adults, sex trafficking, sextortion and image-based sexual abuse.

Meta heavily depends on teen users to make money, so it makes sense the company would want to distance itself from sextortion. But launching a safety campaign for selfish reasons doesn’t necessarily mean it’s shoddy or duplicitous work. Some of the tools and resources Meta has rolled out can be helpful to parents looking to protect their kids online.

According to its press release, Meta worked with NCMEC and Thorn, a tech non-profit working to combat online child sexual abuse, to help teens and parents learn how to avoid sexploitation scams.

Instagram users in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia — the most likely targets of sexploitation — will be shown a one-minute animated video in the coming weeks explaining what sextortion is, what forms it can take, and what to do if you get caught up in one.

The video links to more detailed information on Meta’s new sextortion page. Another page for parents identifies clues that could mean a child is being exploited online.

To combat scams, Meta is adding another suite of tools to its new teen accounts, which offer greater automatic privacy and parental oversight protections for young people on Instagram. The anti-sextortion features include filters to recognize and block “scammy” accounts from following teens or seeing who they follow, a filter that blurs messages with nudity, and an alert that lets users know when they’re messaging someone in a different country.

Instagram will also link people who report sextortion or online child exploitation directly to a Crisis Text Line for help and counseling.

Soon, Meta plans to launch a program preventing users from taking screenshots of images that disappear after being opened, or after a certain number of hours. Teens often use these disappearing-images to send nude photos because they offer the illusion of safety and privacy.

Meta should be praised for taking steps to protect kids and families from sextortion and online exploitation. But it’s still important to consider the source. On this year’s Dirty Dozen list, NCOSE wrote:

A flood of evidence from the past year alone — from whistleblowers, lawsuits, investigations, and Congressional hearings — has confirmed the suspicions of many: Mark Zuckerberg and Meta leadership have a very long track record of explicitly making the choice not to rectify harms it knows it is both causing and perpetuating on children…or only doing so when forced by public pressure, bad press, or Congressional hearings.

Perhaps that explains why its campaign comes some three years too late.

In the first six months of 2024, the Department of Homeland Security’s CyberCrime center took 8,000 reports of financial sextortion — more than three times what they took in all of 2022. NCMEC receives more than 812 reports of sextortion per week, with financial sextortion being the most common complaint.

The FBI believes at least 20 boys that have committed suicide because of the panic and shame associated with financial sextortion.

Meta has financial incentives to keep your child scrolling on Instagram as long as possible. No safety regulations will ever come before its desire to make a profit. That’s why parents must take ultimate responsibility for keeping their kids safe online. The safest decision you can make is arguably keeping your child off social media all together.

If that seems too extreme or daunting, read through some of Meta’s resources to educate yourself on the issue. There’s no use throwing the baby out with the bath water — and you might find some nuggets of wisdom. The NCMEC’s page on sextortion and the Daily Citizen articles linked below are also great places to start.

Additional Articles and Resources

Teen Boys Falling Prey to Financial Sextortion — Here’s What Parents Can Do

Zuckerberg Implicated in Meta’s Failures to Protect Children

Instagram Content Restrictions Don’t Work, Tests Show

‘The Dirty Dozen List’ — Corporations Enable and Profit from Sexual Exploitation

Meta Takes Steps to Prevent Kids From Sexting

Survey Finds Teens Use Social Media More Than Four Hours Per Day — Here’s What Parents Can Do

Four Ways to Protect Your Kids from Bad Tech, from Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt