Instagram to Launch ‘Nudity Protection’ Feature to Protect Teens
By Movieguide® Contributor
To combat the increasing rates of sexual abuse and harassment occurring on social media, Instagram will launch a new “nudity protection” feature to help protect teens.
“We’re testing new features to help protect young people from sextortion and intimate image abuse, and to make it more difficult for potential scammers and criminals to find and interact with teens,” a blog post from Instagram announced.
The company is also going to test “new ways to help people spot potential sextortion scams, encourage them to report and empower them to say no to anything that makes them feel uncomfortable.”
According to Meta, “Sextortion is the threat to reveal intimate images to force you to do something you don’t want to do.”
Instagram’s nudity protection feature will focus primarily on monitoring direct messages.
“While people overwhelmingly use DMs to share what they love with their friends, family or favorite creators, sextortion scammers may also use private messages to share or ask for intimate images,” Instagram wrote. “To help address this, we’ll soon start testing our new nudity protection feature in Instagram DMs, which blurs images detected as containing nudity and encourages people to think twice before sending nude images. This feature is designed not only to protect people from seeing unwanted nudity in their DMs, but also to protect them from scammers who may send nude images to trick people into sending their own images in return.”
For any user under the age of 18, the protection plan will be on by default. Users over 18 can opt out of the feature.
When the feature is enabled, people sending images with nudity will receive a message “reminding them to be cautious when sending sensitive photos, and that they can unsend these photos if they’ve changed their mind.”
This is an important step in protecting teens from sexual content on Instagram.
Movieguide® previously reported on ways teens can avoid sexual content on social media:
On The Washington Post instagram page, the news outlet offered followers tips on how to avoid seeing sexual content on apps like Instagram and TikTok.
“If your TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts or Snapchat feeds are showing you content you don’t want to see, there are some simple — if time-sucking — ways to try to fix it,” The Washington Post wrote.
Their tips read:
1. Say you’re not interested: Each app has a way to say you’re not interested or to dislike a video, either by pressing and holding (TikTok) selecting the More options (three dots on Instagram and Snapchat) or hitting dislike (YouTube).
2. Seek out content you do like: Look up hashtags and keywords for your core interests, follow those creators and read or engage in the comments.
3. Train yourself to look away: To decide what to show you, the apps take note of how long you view a video, whether you read the comments, and if you click on the creator’s profile. Scroll away quickly, consistently.
4. Give it time: To get your feeds right where you want them, you’ll need to invest time — days or weeks — and along the way probably see videos that you don’t want.
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