Sextortion

Sextortion is a pernicious form of blackmail that involves individuals coercing others into sharing intimate images or videos, often employing threats of exposure or harm. The venue of this crime intensifies its complexity: typically transpiring in private message exchanges, sextortion is largely concealed from platform view, making detection particularly challenging. Victims, paralyzed by fear and oftentimes explicitly warned against seeking help or alerting authorities by the perpetrator, remain silent, which compounds the issue further. Their silence and the crime's inherent clandestine nature present a dual challenge: the crime goes unreported, and any platform intervention risks being perceived as intrusive. Traditional approaches to content moderation are ill-suited for handling sextortion. Intervention in private messages typically runs counter to users' expectation of privacy. 

One thing to note is the way that platforms enable abusers to reach a larger scale and a broader audience than they would be able to without it. Abusers trying to sextort people can largely make attempts to do so with impunity at scale - using new accounts to avoid on-platform consequences, and VPNs to avoid off-platform ones. Abusers also can (and do) target children with these schemes, something that they would not be able to routinely attempt without the distance and pseduonymity the internet provides.

The few design approaches listed below might make a small difference in the frequency and severity of sextortion cases, but ultimately this is a problem that will continue to plague platforms into the future.