london –

Instagram said it is deploying new tools to protect young people and combat sextortion, including the ability to automatically blur nudity in direct messages.

The social media platform said in a blog post on Thursday that it was testing the features as part of its campaign to combat sex scams and other forms of “image abuse” and make it harder for criminals to contact teenagers.

Sextortion, or sextortion, involves convincing someone to send explicit photos online and then threatening to make the images public unless the victim pays or offers sexual favors. Recent high-profile cases include two Nigerian brothers who pleaded guilty to sexually extorting teenage boys and young men in Michigan, one of whom committed suicide, and a Virginia sheriff’s deputy who sexually extorted and kidnapped a 15-year-old girl.

Instagram and other social media companies are facing growing criticism for not doing enough to protect young people. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Instagram owner Meta Platforms, apologized to parents of victims of such abuse during a Senate hearing earlier this year.

Menlo Park, California-based Meta also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, but the nudity blur feature will not be added to messages sent on those platforms.

Instagram says scammers often use direct messages to solicit “intimate images.” To address the issue, it will soon start testing a nudity protection feature for direct messages, which will blur any images with nudity “and encourage people to think twice before sending nude images.”

“This feature is designed not only to prevent people from seeing unnecessary nudity in their DMs, but also to protect them from scammers who may send nude photos to trick people into sending photos of themselves in return,” Instagram said.

This feature will be enabled by default for teenagers under the age of 18 globally. Adult users will receive a notification encouraging them to activate the feature.

Nudity will be blurred with a warning, giving the user the option to view it. They can also choose to block the sender and report the chat.

For those who send explicit private messages, they will receive a message reminding them to be careful when sending “sensitive photos.” They are also told they can unsend the photos if they change their mind, but others may have already seen them.

As with many of Meta’s tools and policies around child safety, critics see the move as a positive step but not enough.

“I think the tools announced to protect senders are welcome. But what about recipients?” said Arturo Béjar, the social media giant’s former director of engineering who is famous for his work on Known for its expertise in curbing online harassment. Eight teenagers receive unwanted advances on Instagram every seven days, he said, citing internal research he compiled while at Meta and submitted testimony to Congress in November. “What tools did they get? If they got unwanted nudity, what could they do?”

Behar said “things are not going to meaningfully change” unless there is a way for teens to say they received unwanted advances and be transparent about it.

Instagram said it is developing technology to help identify accounts that may be involved in sextortion scams “based on a range of signals that may indicate sextortion behavior.”

It has also taken steps to stop criminals from contacting young people, including not showing the “message” button on teenagers’ profiles to potential sextortion accounts, even if they already follow each other, and testing hiding teenagers from those accounts new method.

In January, the FBI warned of a “significant increase” in sextortion cases against children, including financial extortion and threats to publish problematic images unless victims paid. The intended victims are primarily boys between the ages of 14 and 17, but the FBI says any child could be a victim. During the six-month period from October 2022 to March 2023, the FBI saw an increase of more than 20% in the number of reports of financially motivated sextortion cases involving underage victims compared to the same period last year.