Meta Expands Take It Down Tool to Combat Sextortion of Minors

Meta announced on 17 October 2026 that it is expanding its Take It Down service, operated in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to enable minors and their families to proactively submit hashes of intimate images before they are shared online, aiming to prevent sextortion attempts in which offenders threaten to distribute such images unless a victim complies with demands. The company stated that the updated tool will work across Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, and that it has processed more than 500,000 Take It Down requests since the service launched in 2023, with reports of financial sextortion targeting teenagers increasing by 35 per cent in the past year.

Reactive takedown tools address the distribution of an image after it has been weaponised, but sextortion begins in the coercive conversation that precedes the threat. Guardii's anti-sextortion detection module operates at the point of first contact, identifying patterns of manipulation, isolation and escalating demands in real-time direct messages and blocking or flagging the hostile conversation before an offender extracts imagery or issues a threat, surfacing the incident to a parent or authority and enabling intervention at the earliest stage of harm.