Samantha Kelly is a freelance writer with a focus on consumer technology, AI, social media, Big Tech, emerging trends and how they impact our everyday lives. Her work has been featured on CNN, NBC, NPR, the BBC, Mashable and more.
Instagram will no longer allow people to take screenshots or screen recordings of ephemeral images or videos sent in direct messages. It's one of the service's latest safety guardrails meant to help protect teens against financial sextortion. The alarming trend refers to scammers who target kids and teens by threatening to post their explicit images online unless they send money or gift cards.
Now, if a user sends a photo or video in a private Instagram message or via Facebook Messenger using its "view once" or "allow replay" feature, recipients won't be allowed to save it with a screenshot or recording without the sender's consent.
Other new safety measures include an in-app sextortion education PSA that will appear in the feeds of millions of teens and young adults about how to spot sextortion scams and what to do if targeted.
Instagram is also experimenting with alerting teens if they're chatting with someone who may be based in a different country. And if Instagram detects potential scam-like behavior from certain accounts, it will block them from seeing others' followers or following lists - a method used by some criminals as a way to blackmail their targets.
The company said it is also formally rolling out its previously announced nudity protection tool for teens under 18, by warning users if photos in DMs appear to contain nudity before they open them.
Instagram said it worked with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and child safety research group Thorn to help inform the new tools. NCMEC noted financial sextortion has dramatically increased in recent years, with attempted reports rising by over 300% from 2021 to 2023.
Last year, Instagram's parent company, Meta, teamed up with the center to develop Take It Down, which lets young users create a unique digital fingerprint for explicit photos they want removed online. Snapchat has also rolled out guardrails to curb potential sextortion, including making it harder for teens to be contacted by people they don't know and by alerting them if that person has been blocked or reported by others.