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Instagram Announce New Feature To Moderate And Filter Abusive Content

It’s reassuring to see Instagram concentrating on reducing the amount of abuse their users are exposed to, the idea of giving the user the power to moderate themselves gets a big thumbs up from us!

Instagram, the giant photo sharing app, has announced a new feature that will allow users to moderate and filter out abusive comments. Currently, users have no way of stopping negative or abusive comments from appearing on their Instagram page. With over 300 million active daily users Instagram accounts can be vulnerable to cyberbullying, spamming, trolling and hateful comments due to the anonymity and huge numbers of users.

Currently, the new feature will be available to business users only and will allow them to manage feedback and comments by filtering and blocking any abusive or unsolicited responses. The change has been made to help people with professional profiles protect their businesses reputation and public profile (if you need support with abusive comments on Instagram or any other platform visit our cyberbullying and digital abuse help center or explore our total access support service to see the varying ways we can help you).

Online reputation management is a huge issue for businesses and for many other people who are using social media to self promote their talents or hobbies to a wide audience, so offering a tool to manage negative content makes a lot of sense.
However, it remains to be seen if and when this new feature will be made available to ordinary users, there are millions of non-business users on Instagram – all of whom are potentially vulnerable to bullying and abuse!

‘This is a great way of allowing people to manage comments that could be seen by the public on their Instgram page. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but if it is your online space that someone is disrespecting, then you should have the power to block it.”

Dan Raisbeck, Co Founder, The Cybersmile Foundation

This latest move follows changes made last April by the Facebook owned app, which toughened its stance on pornography and harassment.

“In the old guidelines, we would say ‘don’t be mean’, now we’re actively saying you can’t harass people. The language is just stronger.”

Nicky Jackson Colaco, Director of Public Policy, Instagram

Instagram deal with hundreds of thousands of complaints each month and with social media becoming increasingly integral to so many young peoples, these changes have the potential to make a real difference to a huge amount of peoples lives. If you are affected by cyberbullying or digital abuse of any description please visit our help center or visit our total access support services. For further information about Cybersmile and the work we do, please explore the following suggestions.

Do you use Instagram? What are your thoughts about the new feature? Tweet us over @CybersmileHQ!