Meta sponsors program to help tweens avoid exploitation

Parents and educators have a new tool in the fight against online exploitation.

Meta announced Tuesday the launch of curriculum designed to help middle schoolers spot and avoid online exploitation, including a technique commonly known as sextortion.

Victims of such exploitation often believe they are messaging with another teen and eventually share a graphic or explicit image of themselves. The person then threatens to make the picture public unless the victim pays them.

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Childhelp, a leading child safety non-profit organization, developed the curriculum in partnership with Meta, and in consultation with other topic experts, including the Department of Homeland Security and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Adults can access the educational materials for free.

The content offers videos, scripted lesson plans, and interactive classroom activities. The goal is to help young people learn about personal boundaries, safe relationships, and how to ask for help.

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"With the increase in online dangers, this partnership will allow facilitators of the lessons to empower millions of young people to speak up and be comfortable in asking for help," Michael Medoro, chief of staff at Childhelp, said in a statement.

While sextortion can happen on any platform, and between people who know each other in person, criminals and scammers have used Meta to target victims.

Last year, the company removed at least 63,000 Instagram accounts in Nigeria that attempted to financially extort victims. The scams were highly coordinated and relied partly on thousands of since-removed Facebook assets, like accounts, pages, and groups, that sold scripts and guides for how to scam people using collections of photos to populate fake accounts.

In October 2024, the Meta social media platform Instagram launched its own campaign against sextortion, along with tools to help teen victims.

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As Meta appears to add resources to prevent exploitation and aid victims, it has come under fire for abandoning fact-checking and relaxing certain hate speech policies.

"At Meta, we continue to do all we can to protect young people on our apps, and those protections will be even more effective if teens also feel confident in spotting potential harms and know where to go for help," Antigone Davis, Meta's global head of safety, said in a statement about the new curriculum.

If you are a child being sexually exploited online, or you know a child who is being sexually exploited online, or you witnessed exploitation of a child occur online, you can report it to the CyberTipline, which is operated by the National Center for Missing Exploited & Children.