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The owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram is going to introduce a new safety tool to stop children from receiving nude pictures – and discourage sending them.
It follows months of criticism from police chiefs and children’s charities over Meta’s decision to encrypt chats on its Messenger app by default.
The company argues that encryption protects privacy, but critics have said it makes it harder for the company to detect child abuse.
The new nudity protection feature for Instagram direct messages will blur images detected as containing nudity, and prompt users to think before sending nude images.
It will be turned on by default for users who say they are under 18, and Instagram will show a notification to adult users to encourage them to turn it on.
Meta’s understanding of a user’s age is based on how old someone says they are when they sign up, so it is not verified by the platform.
Adults are restricted from starting private conversations with users who say they are under 18 – but under the new measures coming in later this year, Meta won’t show the “message” button on a teenager’s profile to potential “sextortion” accounts, even if they’re already connected.
Sextortion is when children are blackmailed with the threat of compromising images being sent to family or released on social media unless money is paid.
“We’re also testing hiding teens from these accounts in people’s follower, following and like lists, and making it harder for them to find teen accounts in search results,” representatives said in a blog post published on Thursday.
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