Instagram to block some screenshots to help prevent sextortion

The NSPCC said the moves were a “step in the right direction”.

But Richard Collard, its associate head of child safety online policy, said that “questions remain as to why Meta are not rolling out similar protections on all their products, including on WhatsApp where grooming and sextortion also take place at scale”.

Law enforcement agencies around the world have reported a rise in the number of sextortion scams taking place across social media platforms, with these often targeting teenage boys.

The UK’s Internet Watch Foundation said in March that 91% of the sextortion reports it received in 2023 related to boys.

New tools will include preventing the ability to screenshot images and videos sent in Instagram messages with its “view once” or “allow replay” mechanisms – which can be selected by users when sending an image or video in Direct Messages. This will also apply to the web version of Instagram.

Antigone Davis, Meta’s head of global safety, said a new Instagram campaign aims to give children and parents information about how to spot sextortion attempts in case perpetrators evade its tools for detecting them.

“We have put in built-in protections so that parents do not have to do a thing to try and protect their teens,” she told BBC News.

“That said, this is the kind of adversarial crime where whatever protections we put in place, these extortion scammers are going to try and get around them.”