Chances are a young boy is on his cell phone chatting on Instagram with someone he just met. He thinks the other person is a teen and attends a neighboring school. Before he knows it, the conversation immediately changes as his inbox is now flooded with nude pics and the person sending them is requesting he do the same. Once he sends a compromising photo of himself, the climate of the conversation changes — this is the beginning of sextortion.“They, all have phones. We’re all online.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram wants to help in the fight against sextortion. The company recently added more guardrails for teen accounts.“So you know, we’re always working to improve our tools around important topics like this. I am a mother of four, two of my children are teenagers. And so this is the thing that we think about a lot in our house. And we have to talk about it with our kids as well.
“So for teenagers, they’ll automatically be opted into this,” Moylan explained. “Obviously, they can also report those images to us so that we know that these images are happening. And we’ll send them safety tools like the take it down tool, which will let us sort of take power over our own.”“So obviously, this is a thing we’ve been working to improve for a long time.