Sextortion Awareness Campaign and Safety Features for Teens

The campaign empowers teens against sextortion through innovative safety features and parental support.

### Addressing Sextortion: Awareness Campaign and Safety Features
* 🔍 The campaign aims to raise awareness about sextortion, which involves **threats to expose sexual images or videos** to extort **money or favors** from individuals.
* ⚠ Key red flags to watch for include someone being **overly aggressive**, requesting **photo exchanges**, or trying to **move conversations to different apps**.
* 🛡 Antigeni Davis, the global head of safety for Matter, discusses new protective features like **preventing screenshots of view-once images** to safeguard users' privacy.
* 🚫 Additional measures include **blocking follow requests from suspicious accounts** and **hiding the follower lists of teens** to protect them from potential scammers.
* 📈 The campaign's launch reflects a **shift in sextortion tactics towards financial crimes**, prompting the introduction of **stricter protections for teen accounts**.
* 💬 Parents' concerns about teen screen time have led to features that **limit notifications during nighttime hours**, promoting **healthier usage habits**.
* 💻 Technology plays a crucial role in identifying potential scams, with systems in place to **flag suspicious accounts based on their activity patterns**.
* 📜 The ongoing dialogue with parents and calls for clearer standards aim to create a **safer online environment for teens**, emphasizing the need for **age-appropriate app experiences**.

The campaign raises awareness of sextortion and includes this ad. Let's talk about sextortion. That's when someone threatens to expose a sexual image or video to get you to do something like send money. Here are some red flags to look out for: someone coming on too strong, asking to trade photos, or move to another app. Here to talk more about the changes is Antigeni Davis, who is a global head of safety for matter. And it's not just the ad campaign or crisis line, but it's also product features, updates. Can you talk us through them? Yeah, absolutely. I'll give you three of the most compelling features. So one is the prevention of screenshots. So if you send a view once image or video, we're going to prevent somebody from screenshotting that image or recording that video. That's important because you're sending a signal that you want to protect that image and you don't want someone sharing

that with somebody. And the other is blocking the follow requests of potentially scammy accounts. This is important because we already block message requests even from just on connected accounts for teens. But we want to make sure that we're closing down the avenues for these scammers to try to find teens on the platform. And then the other one is hiding the follower and following lists of teens from these potential scammers. The reason that's important is because once they have that image, they threaten to share with the friends and family that they find on those lists and taken. Why is the campaign being launched today and not previously a year ago when when data showed spikes in this kind of activity that you're now trying to prevent and crack down on? Yeah. Thank you very much. This has been building on initial additional protections that we had already launched. So recently we launched teen accounts that put teens automatically into private accounts and have our strictest messaging restrictions.

This is taking it another layer out, and it reflects a change in the crime. It's moved to becoming a financial crime where people ask for more money. And with that, there's been a spike of this across the Internet. And take the how's the technology changed if there's a change in the crime? What my colleague Olivia Colville reported, for example, was in the case of Facebook in Nigeria, for example, technology is used to as a counter to suspicious activity. So you have the video which we showed. But what's the role of technology here? Yeah, it's a very, very good question. The technology tries to identify potentially scamming accounts, and they'll do things like they see a new account that sends a lot of follow requests to a team that is outside of the two teams that are outside of the area where that initial individual is messaging from or following from. Those are the kinds of signals we use.

We use a large range of signals to identify these scamming accounts, potentially scamming. They're not skimming. If they're skimming, we're going to remove them. But potentially skimming accounts. You're, of course, helping hide from these potentially scamming accounts. Why not let a team just hide full stop their followers and who they follow? Well, it's a good question. These are features that are important for connecting and finding the people that you're interested in. And we want to protect those valuable features for enjoying the app, but we want to find ways to make sure that they can't be exploited by these scammers. If you, I'm sure, face countless questions and indeed your company and others face countless lawsuits now from families, from authorities that feel that what you offer on social media is harmful for children, whether indeed it's sextortion or indeed addiction. How are you fighting those fights? How do you feel that it's coming to you

at a lawsuit perspective? Well, from my perspective, the thing that's most important is to listen to parents and understand what it is that they're worried about and make sure that they feel that we can that we have the protections that give them the peace of mind. So we know, for example, parents are worried about the amount of time that teens are spending on the platform. So when we launched teen accounts, we've now created it so that between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., they're not getting notifications to their account. And we're sending an auto reply saying, Hey, this is time for. Time for sleep and take it easy. I'm interested in the audience you're trying to protect and how they use the technology. You have to family of apps largely smartphone centric, but sometimes they're accessed through a web browser right on the computer. How do you adjust your technology and your policy for that, how people

actually access your applications? That's a that's a really good question. And one of the things that I can give you an example of is for screenshot. So we are now preventing screenshots, as I mentioned, for certain types of image sharing on the browser. You can't really prevent that screenshot. So we're just preventing them from actually sharing, seeing the image. I go back to the point that you say you're listening to what parents and indeed I'm sure some teens are saying to you, what about as you see these legal efforts proceeding? Do you, in your heart of hearts, feel enough is being done for the parents, for the teens using it? And do you think the legal way in which they're pursuing the claims is the right way for them to try and make change? I think one of the things that parents are struggling with is a set of standards that they can understand for assessing whether their teen should use a particular app.

One of the things that we've been pushing for is legislation that would require the operating system or the App Store to provide apps like ours with the age of the user. That would enable us to ensure that we can provide an age-appropriate experience. And they can also set it up so that parents can not approve of an app download if they want to. These are the kinds of things we need to make it much simpler for parents.

Meta Sets New Safety Measures To Combat "Sextortion"

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The campaign aims to raise awareness of sextortion, which involves threatening to expose sexual images or videos for manipulation.

Key red flags include someone being overly aggressive, asking for photo trades, or moving to another app.

The campaign includes product features like preventing screenshots, blocking follow requests from suspicious accounts, and hiding teens' follower lists to protect them from potential scammers.

The Shift in Online Crime and Technology's Response

Online crime has evolved into financial crime, with a noticeable increase in scams across the Internet.

Technology is being used to identify potentially scamming accounts through various signals, such as unusual follow requests.

While hiding followers is a potential solution, the platform aims to protect valuable features for users while finding ways to prevent exploitation by scammers.

Addressing Parent and Teen Concerns on Social Media

The speaker emphasizes the importance of listening to parents' worries about their teens' use of the platform.

To address these concerns, they have implemented features like disabling notifications for teen accounts between 10 p.

and preventing image sharing through screenshots on the browser.

The speaker acknowledges the struggle parents face in setting standards for assessing app usage for their teens.

There is a push for legislation requiring operating systems and app stores to provide user age information to apps.

This would help apps offer age-appropriate experiences and allow parents to have a say in app downloads.

The goal is to simplify the process for parents in managing their children's app usage.