According to the FBI, suicides among teenage sextortion victims have grown to an alarming state. Snapchat has taken immediate steps to curb them.
Social media is a digital world where anything is possible if the user allows it. As much as healthy and growth-oriented socializing opportunities exist on Snapchat, the platform has grown its population of spammers, fraudsters, and, at worst, predators. According to the FBI, the number of sextortion cases and financial scams by a new growing set of masked users called Bad Actors is growing at an alarming rate.
Teenagers under 18 are the main victims of these types of scams and usually never report it to authorities due to fear of defamation or other negative consequences until it's too late. As a result, the number of suicides among such social sextortion victims has spiked unprecedently by 20% since last year. To curb the rising number of social sextortion, Snapchat has introduced strict security measures, especially aimed at underage application users.
The Snapchat predators are typical bad actors with offshore accounts and target young teenage boys to exchange explicit and sexual images or videos. Then, they reveal their true identity to blackmail the victims into sending money or carrying illegal favors to prevent leaking their explicit media online.
Snapchat is immediately rolling out automatic blockers against previously reported Snapchat accounts by other users. For instance, a Snapchat account reported to be a predator or fraud by a user will be automatically blocked from sending requests or messages to other underage accounts. It will provide clear notification of the account status, even for adult users, asking for consent to allow messages or friend requests.
"These features were designed to better protect teens from potential online harms and to enhance the real-friend connections that make Snapchat so unique," said Snap's Global Head of Platform Safety, Jacqueline Beauchere, in an exclusive statement to CNN ahead of the announcement.
The application has also turned off all underage users' location sharing on the Snap Map by default, allowing them to change their settings manually. The app also blocks new messages from Snapchat accounts that do not belong to a user’s region. Snapchat has also introduced an added security layer that blocks new Snapchat accounts from a device that was blocked by a user earlier.
Before Snapchat, Meta also introduced stricter measures to prevent interactions between underage accounts and potentially shady adult accounts. Social media platforms have finally recognized the importance of underage users’ protection from harmful interactions, which may help bring down the alarming social-media-induced suicide rate globally.
