Instagram has recently announced the introduction of a new set of features designed to help users protect themselves from harassment and abuse on the platform.
Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, spoke of how Instagram will attempt to protect its more than 1 billion users from seeing abusive, racist, sexist, and homophobic content in an official Instagram blog post, commenting, "We have a responsibility to make sure everyone feels safe when they come to Instagram. We don't allow hate speech or bullying on Instagram, and we remove it whenever we find it. We also want to protect people from having to experience this abuse in the first place."
Changes cover three main areas:
- A new 'Limits' feature that gives users the ability to limit comments and DM requests during spikes of increased attention from those who don't follow them or recently started following them.
- Stronger automated warnings to people attempting to post potentially offensive comments that now inform users their account may be deleted if they continue to try posting abuse.
- The global rollout of a new "Hidden Words" feature, which allows people to filter out abusive words, phrases, and emojis in DMs.
The new features come after a series of highly publicized offensive comments, including racial slurs, were aimed at England players following the Euro 2020 final, highlighting the problem that Instagram content creators, public figures, and users face when targeted by people who join in conversations purely to post abusive comments.
Providing users with the ability to control surges in negative engagement without limiting their ability to connect with genuine followers and fans will make a huge difference, not only to account holders but also to what their online community is exposed to.
Dan Raisbeck, Co-founder, The Cybersmile Foundation
Facebook have indicated that they are taking additional steps to protect younger users on Instagram, including automatically defaulting under 16s into private accounts, making it harder for potentially suspicious accounts to find teens, limiting the options advertisers have to reach those younger viewers with ads, and using artificial intelligence to detect user ages.