Bloomberg investigative reporter and former NZ Herald and Stuff journalist Olivia Carville. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Meta says it will trial technology to blur nudes on Instagram - it comes as one of the world’s top media companies publishes an investigation into sextortion by a New York-based New Zealand journalist. Warning: This column deals with suicide. Please see below for help and crisis information.
The social media messages are haunting.
Jordan DeMay: Why are you doing this to me? I am begging for my own life.
“Dani”: 10... 9... 8... I bet your GF will leave you for some other dude.
Jordan: I will be dead. Like I want to KMS [kill myself]
“Dani”: Sure. I will watch you die a miserable death.
Jordan: It’s over. You win bro…. I am kms rn. Bc of you.
“Dani”: Good. Do that fast. Or I’ll make you do it. I swear to God.
Jordan DeMay, a 17-year-old American student, took his own life in March 2022, soon after this Instagram direct message (DM) exchange with “Dani”, a person he originally thought was a young woman.
A few hours earlier that evening, the rising football and basketball star had shared with “Dani” a nude photo of himself after building a rapport that turned flirtatious.
But as soon as the photo was sent, “Dani” quickly revealed themselves to be a scammer, successfully extorting an initial US$300 ($507) from the teenager by threatening to release the image unless he didn’t pay.
That payment didn’t stop “Dani” from wanting more money. “She” kept at Jordan that night, threatening to release the image to his girlfriend, family and friends.
In just a matter of hours, Jordan was dead, having taken his own life in his bedroom just after 3.30am.
“Dani” turned out to be two scammers - brothers based in Lagos, Nigeria, who were extradited to the United States in 2023 and who this month pleaded guilty to conspiring to sexually exploit teenage boys.
The pair, aged 20 and 22, face a minimum of 15 years and a maximum of 30 years in prison.
Jordan’s death - and the harrowing DMs - form part of a special news investigation and Bloomberg Businessweek magazine cover story by New York-based Bloomberg investigative reporter Olivia Carville, one of New Zealand journalism’s finest exports.
Carville revealed in her story that in a little over two years, more than two dozen young Americans had taken their own lives as a result of sextortion - most of them boys.
Carville’s investigation appears to also have been a catalyst for Instagram and Facebook owner Meta to announce a new trial, in which it will use AI to blur intimate images.
In a statement on April 11, after Carville had sent the global giant a list of questions but before her news feature was published, Meta announced it was introducing new tools to prevent the “horrific crime” of financial sextortion.
It said it had spent years working with experts on understanding scammers’ latest tactics and how to combat them.
“While people overwhelmingly use DMs to share what they love with their friends, family or favourite creators, sextortion scammers may also use private messages to share or ask for intimate images,” Meta said.
“To help address this, we’ll soon start testing our new nudity protection feature in Instagram DMs, which blurs images detected as containing nudity and encourages people to think twice before sending nude images. This feature is designed not only to protect people from seeing unwanted nudity in their DMs, but also to protect them from scammers who may send nude images to trick people into sending their own images in return.”
Meta said nudity protection would be turned on by default for teens under 18 globally, “and we’ll show a notification to adults encouraging them to turn it on”.
In her article, Carville quotes Paul Raffile, an analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute in New Jersey, and his work into the tactics of the sextortion scammers.
He uncovered an organised network based out of Nigeria - including easily discoverable scripts that the scammers used to target victims.
Carville quotes Raffile as saying none of the social media companies had contacted him after his report was released in January.
Raffile told Carville that social media companies “could have curbed this crime from the beginning”.
“It’s a disastrous intelligence failure that over the past 18 months all these deaths and all this trauma was preventable with sufficient moderation.”
Carville’s work speaks to the power of journalism - and the impact it can have in holding major corporations, such as Meta, accountable.
Covering suicide requires deep care - as illustrated by NZ Herald senior reporter Anna Leask’s investigation last weekend into the death of 9-year-old Sage Matutaera Ross.
Debate has bubbled away for many years as to how media should cover suicide - the Ministry of Health has a careful set of guidelines that media companies in New Zealand follow.
Cases such as Jordan DeMay and Sage Matutaera Ross speak to the sensitivity and diligence of reporters like Carville, Leask and others to earn the confidence of families and authorities.
Carville - a former NZ Herald, Stuff and Toronto Star journalist - has been in the United States for the past six years, firstly studying at Columbia Journalism School in New York, before Bloomberg hired her as an intern in 2018.
Before that, in 2017, she led the NZ Herald’s acclaimed Break the Silence series that investigated New Zealand’s abnormally high teen suicide rate, a project that won her best investigation and the Herald best editorial campaign at the annual Voyager Media Awards.
“In an outstanding field of entries, Break the Silence wins because it tackled one of New Zealand’s taboos and, with its detailed exposes, forced the authorities to admit that they were failing our youth,” the Voyager judges said. “In particular, the Northland story and the research of every secondary school showed an exemplary level of investigation, ensuring the coverage was highly credible and truly national in scope.”
From New York, and by email, Carville told Media Insider that she’d been “reporting on the intersection of child safety and the digital world for a number of years now”.
This included writing about TikTok, Snap, Meta “and the various ways young users have been harmed by social media”.
“An entire generation of kids has grown up addicted to smartphones and we have no idea what the long-term consequence of that psychological experiment is going to be,” says Carville.
“Because I write about the dark sides of the digital world, I’d heard about this growing crime called sextortion. It wasn’t until I became aware of the tragic death of Jordan DeMay that I decided to write about it. I spent a week reporting in Marquette and Grand Rapids [Michighan].”
She said the investigation had taken two to three months of reporting, researching and editing.
Carville says her previous work had helped her build confidence and trust with sources. “The family wanted to share Jordan’s story to help raise awareness of the crime - as the FBI says, the only way to stop the spread of sextortion is to talk about it.”
Bloomberg lifted the paywall on Carville’s article, “allowing it to become a PSA for teens, parents, teachers and police”.
Over the years, and while I was managing editor at NZME, we made several attempts to lure Carville back to the Herald newsroom.
I hope she will return one day.
“I moved to the US because I realised I had a hole in my resume,” she told Media Insider.
“I didn’t know how to investigate corporations, or write critically about businesses, or follow the money. So I studied my masters in financial reporting at Columbia Journalism School and was lucky enough to be hired as an intern at Bloomberg when I graduated in 2018. The past six years have been one giant learning curve. And I’m still learning; every story teaches me something new.”
Experts say sextortion in New Zealand is at epidemic levels.
Netsafe chief executive Brent Carey told me in March that there had been an 88 per cent increase in complaints to Netsafe. Police were receiving about 50 cases a week, he said.
Victims were generally younger and were being blackmailed for content or money.
Young boys were being targeted the most, he said.
They were being blackmailed for money after sending the likes of nude images to those they thought were generally young women. The “young women” turn out to be scammers and threaten to release the images unless money is paid.
“It’s an impersonation scam,” Carey says.
His advice?
“This is organised crime often and the main thing is to try and pause - stop engaging with the scammer. Often they don’t follow through, they move on to the next victim. This is a numbers game.
“Contact Netsafe so that we can talk about their privacy and security settings that are applied, how to block someone, how to block that contact. Obviously, we’re working with parents and young people, and talking to parents about their safety settings.”
The Government is set to consider multimillion-dollar relief for a range of media companies, after direct pleas to Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee.
In a statement to Media Insider, Lee confirmed she had met with Freeview TV representatives and Sky TV New Zealand two weeks ago - and that one of the topics was relief from Kordia transmission fees, which currently total about $40 million a year across the media sector.
Freeview’s shareholders include TVNZ, Warner Bros Discovery, RNZ and Whakaata Māori (Māori Television).
“I asked them to come back to me with any formal requests which I would look at when and if received,” Lee told Media Insider in a statement.
While Lee said no Government decisions had been made, it looks increasingly likely this is an area that will be covered in her much-hyped Cabinet report considering ways to help the media industry in challenging economic times and digital upheaval.
Newshub is shutting down in early July - with its 6pm news to be replaced by a bulletin provided by Stuff - while TVNZ has announced big cutbacks including the loss of its Sunday and Fair Go shows.
State-owned enterprise (SOE) Kordia is the country’s primary free-to-air broadcast television and radio transmission provider. As an SOE, it is required to act as a profit-maximising commercial entity.
Kordia fees were relaxed for about six months as part of the previous Labour Government’s Covid-19 media support package. That initiative saw about $20.5 million in total relief.
“At the time... Treasury advised that Kordia charges approximately $40m per year to provide broadcast transmission services to media entities in both television and radio,” according to a Ministry of Culture and Heritage aide memoire to Lee in December last year.
“The Transmission Fee Waiver scheme was successful in providing broadcasters with cashflow relief at a time of heightened uncertainty and a drop in advertising revenue. However, it was difficult to administer and relatively costly for short-term effect.
“Treasury’s view at the time was that the transmission fee waiver was unlikely to make a material difference to the risk of media company failure and does not provide support for long-term media company solvency.”
Nevertheless, media companies appear keen to see similar relief reintroduced.
Freeview general manager Leon Mead confirmed the “wheels are moving” in terms of a formal request for relief.
“We have to look at something that’s sustainable. How we do that is part of what we are looking at. We have to work that through in terms of how the model would work.”
Asked how confident he was that the Government might offer relief, Mead said: “I don’t know - I can’t speak to that.”
However, he was sure Kiwis wanted to see New Zealand TV channels operating successfully and “we need to do everything we can to ensure that continues”. Between 2.6 million and 2.7 million used the Freeview service.
A Sky TV spokeswoman said: “We joined the Freeview CEOs in a meeting with the minister a fortnight ago and discussed the issues facing the local media sector.
“The future of transmission was one topic of conversation, including how we continue to serve all New Zealanders [including via satellite, with its coverage across the whole country] as well as the costs of legacy transmission.
“The minister invited the sector CEOs to offer up proposals if we think there is a role for Government on these matters, and from a Sky perspective we’re keen to collaborate with the sector on the longer-term issues of delivering to all of New Zealand.”
As The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive reported last week, relief could be particularly beneficial for Warner Bros Discovery. It’s already closing a newsroom costing tens of millions a year - if it was to receive annual relief from Kordia fees of around $5m, that would also substantially cover the annual fee it pays to Stuff to provide the new news service.
Kordia interim chief executive Neil Livingston said in a statement that the company understood from discussions with its media customers “that covering the costs of transmission fees has become a challenge”.
There were a range of commercial factors “impacting their revenue and costs”, Livingston said.
However, any decision on whether transmission fees were subsidised by the Government was a decision for the Government.
“Our communications with the minister... have been to offer insight into the current delivery of DTT [Digital Television Transmission] in New Zealand and its importance.”
He said Kordia’s transmission network ensured DTT free-to-air television was delivered reliably across the country.
“To ensure continuous and reliable broadcast services, Kordia operates and maintains critical infrastructure around the country, 24/7, 365 days per year.
“DTT is still the most common way for New Zealanders to access free television. It contributes greatly to the equity of access to television for geographically isolated and rural communities. It also plays an extremely important role in keeping communities informed during civil defence emergencies and safety of life events.
“Kordia charges transmission fees to its DTT broadcasting customers. Our DTT cost model is structured to cover a variety of maintenance costs associated with the infrastructure that delivers the service – such as ongoing equipment, buildings, and tower maintenance, as well as power systems, road access, site rents, and related labour.”
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor and has a small shareholding in NZME.
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