Sexting & Sextortion Scams
1. Social media companies don't care. They never will and they will do as little as possible to stem the problem.
2. I'd love to know how many of those 12,500 cases resulted in prosecution. I bet that number is far below 1%.
3. Until we demand social media companies create a verification process (a real one) then they will continue to undermine every aspect of our lives. Social media companies will fight it all the way because bots, trolls and multiple accounts are all counted as "unique users" and consume a lot of ads increasing the bottom lines of tech companies.
I deal with piracy issues daily and if the real number of bots on tech platforms were ever exposed it would be so significant it would create a market crash.
from article
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..........“Instagram needs to own a partial responsibility for this,” Margaret said. “We hold our son accountable. He made a bad choice. We’re not saying it’s Instagram’s fault. But I still feel like they should care more about trying to protect these kids.”
A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, declined to comment on this specific case, but urged users to
report both the accounts and the direct messages to speed up the investigation and have a profile removed. (The Washington Post viewed confirmations that the family reported the account.)
Meta established policies last year so that users younger than 16 would automatically have high privacy settings enabled, making it more difficult for people they don’t know to communicate with them. These changes happened months after Christopher’s victimization. In partnership with Thorn, an organization that combats child sex trafficking, Meta also launched
a sextortion hub to help users report the harassment.
Meta products also restrict users over 19 years old from sending messages to teens who don’t follow them. (Of course, any user can fake birth dates when establishing an account.) Meta’s
Parental Supervision tools allow parents to see when their teenager has blocked or reported an account.
Snapchat recently created a
reporting tool specifically for quickly alerting the company about cases of financial sextortion. It lets the users notify the platform by clicking the “Nudity or sexual content” reporting tab and then clicking, “They leaked / are threatening to leak my nudes.”
“I can’t stress enough that we have to encourage users to report bad actors to us, and we have expanded our in-app reporting tools to include a tailored reporting reason specifically around financial sextortion,” said Jacqueline Beauchere, Snapchat’s global head of platform safety.
(The company
did its own study this year that found that 65 percent of the teenage and young adult respondents in Australia, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States had either been targeted or knew someone targeted for sextortion in some way.)..............