Instagram's popular appeal is as a self-publishing platform for photos of your lunch, of you making that silly V sign standing in front of a landmark while forcing a silly facial expression, of a kitten or a landscape or sunset and that's fine and harmless.

But under that is a sub-culture of crime with criminals looking for victims for fraud (it's always fraud, because someone is always lying in order to gain a financial or other benefit). And they do that by engaging someone else in conversation - fraud only works if the victim responds. And like Meta's other products Facebook and WhatsApp, it's that engagement that fuels the success of the product. Interaction between users is at the heart of what Meta does. There are direct and instant messaging functions and that's where the trouble arises.

Meta is taking a two pronged approach: it's using tech to try to identify attempts at fraud and blocking them and it's using tech to try to dissuade potential victims from engaging.

The measures announced yesterday include a pop-up warning that the person with whom someone is engaging may be in a different country to that which he (or she) says he is. Also, lists of those who follow and who are followed will be subject to restricted access. Microsoft's LinkedIn relies extensively on this information being public.

There's a horribly patronising video.

These measures are added to the so-called "Teen Accounts" which are for those under 18 years and which contain a range of security measures but which are dependent on account holders being honest about their age.

Meta, across all its platforms, has its own sanctions list and at the top of that list is the Nigerian Scam group, Yahoo Boys. in the past few months, Meta says, it's removed approaching 10,000 accounts identified as connected to the group which now is engaged in online fraud, its traditional area, and increasingly heavily, sextortion. While Meta is concentrating on children and young persons, sextorion is not respecter of age and so Meta is leaving everyone else exposed and, inevitably, the criminals will move to them. But not entirely so: some of the protections appear to be Instagram-wide but primarily marketed as for the young.

More via Facebook's information page at https://about.fb.com/news/2024/10/instagram-campaign-protect-teens-sext…