Instagram announces new features to protect teens from sextortion scams

Instagram has introduced expanded protective measures against sextortion targeting teenagers, including nudity protection that automatically blurs images containing nudity in direct messages and warns users before sending such images. The feature, rolling out globally for users under 18, uses on-device machine learning to detect intimate images without Meta accessing the content itself, and will also alert teens when they receive suspicious messages from accounts showing potential scammer behaviour patterns, such as newly created profiles or those following large numbers of young users.

When sextortion attempts escalate from initial contact to image exchange, intervention is already late. Anti-sextortion detection that monitors the conversational structure leading up to coercion, rather than waiting for nudity to appear, closes the window before a child is compromised. Guardii deploys precisely this approach: its sextortion-detection module identifies the grooming sequence, the shift in tone, the isolation tactics and the escalation toward image requests as they unfold in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms, blocking hostile contact at the point of approach and surfacing the threat to a parent or safeguarding professional before any image is sent, shared or used as leverage.