Combating sextortion and intimate image abuse

Our policies and enforcement

We have strict rules against content or behavior that exploits people, including sharing or threatening to share someone’s intimate images. We encourage anyone who sees content they think breaks our rules to report it—and we have a dedicated reporting option to use if someone is sharing private images. When we become aware of this content, we work to take action.

We have specialized teams working on combating sextortion. We have identified patterns associated with this behavior, and built automated systems that detect and remove these accounts at scale. We also have dedicated teams that investigate and remove these criminals and report them to authorities, including law enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), when appropriate. We work with partners, like NCMEC and the International Justice Mission, to help train law enforcement around the world to identify, investigate and respond to these types of cases.

How we prevent unwanted contact

We work to protect people from sextortion by preventing unwanted contact, especially between adults and teens. We do this in a variety of ways:

• We automatically set teens’ accounts under 16 (and under 18 in certain countries) to private when they join Instagram. We also don’t allow people who teens don’t follow to tag or mention them, or to include their content in Reels Remixes or Guides by default. These are some of the best ways to help keep young people from hearing from adults they don’t know, or that they don’t want to hear from. Private accounts, available to both teens and adults, also prevent other people from seeing friend/follow lists, which can be used as a lever by people trying to sextort others.
• We restrict adults over 18 from starting private chats with teens they're not connected to on Instagram and Messenger.
• We limit the message requests people can send to someone who doesn’t follow or isn't already connected to them to text-only messages. People can’t send images, videos, or voice notes in message requests until the recipient accepts the request to chat. (Updated on 25th November at 2.30 pm PT to reflect our latest policies.)
• We also introduced stricter default message settings for teens under 16 (and under 18 in certain countries). This means teens can’t be messaged or added to group chats by anyone they don’t follow or aren’t connected to on Instagram and Messenger. This is designed to help teens feel even more confident that they won’t hear from people they don’t know in their private messages.
• We use technology to identify and prevent potentially suspicious adults from finding, following and interacting with teen accounts, and we don’t recommend teen accounts to these adults.

How we educate people

We educate teens when interacting with certain adults.

• We let teens know when a potentially suspicious account has attempted to follow them, and encourage young users to be more cautious.
• We have proactive prompts—or safety notices—that notify young people when an adult who has been exhibiting potentially suspicious behavior is interacting with them in messages. For example, if an adult is sending a large amount of friend requests to people under 18 we’ll alert the recipients within their messages and give them an option to block, report, or restrict the adult.

Expert partnerships

We are committed to working with expert partners to combat sextortion around the world and have been dedicated to this work for many years.

• We worked with Thorn to launch Stop Sextortion in 2017 and partnered with them to adapt these resources onto our Safety Center, translating them into 60+ additional languages. We partnered again with their NoFiltr brand to create educational materials. These resources were designed to help reduce the shame and stigma surrounding intimate images, and empower teens to seek help and take back control if they’ve shared them or are experiencing sextortion.
• Meta is also a founding member of the Lantern program, managed by the Tech Coalition, which enables technology companies to share signals about accounts and behaviors that violate their child safety policies. We provided the Tech Coalition with the technical infrastructure that sits behind the program and continue to maintain it. Participating companies can use this information to conduct investigations on their own platforms and take action. This is incredibly important because we know that predators don’t limit themselves to any one platform—so we need to work together to tackle this.
• Meta continues to support StopNCII.org in expanding its Global Network of Partners, over 90 victim advocates and non-profits around the world who run prevention campaigns and provide support to survivors of sextortion and intimate image abuse.