Instagram has announced new options to help people manage their interactions inside the app and avoid offensive messages and comments directed their way.
Instagram has brought several updates as a response to incidents, including penalties for those that send abusive DMs and the ability for personal accounts to switch off direct messages completely from those they don’t follow.
Now Instagram’s adding even more – the platform is expanding the roll-out of its new ‘Limits’ option, which was tested in July. The limits option enables users to temporarily limit all unwanted messages and comments from selected groups in the app.
What caused changes on Instagram?
Instagram explained that they had developed this feature as they found out how many creators and public figures experience DM requests and spikes of comments from people they don’t know.
Now, everyone who experiences that can turn on Limits and avoid it.
Through Limits, Instagram is recommending groups of accounts that a person might want to restrict.
Instagram says that most of the negativity to public figures in the app comes from people who are not following them or just have recently started following. Limits aim to combat this and will be a great help amid high-profile incidents. Twitter is also exploring similar, with the new feature that will stop other users from @mentioning your profile for a set period.
The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said that they will not allow hate speech or any bullying on Instagram and will remove it whenever they find it.
Adam stated that they hope these new features are going to better protect people from seeing or reading abusive content, whether it’s sexist, racist, homophobic, or any other type of abuse.
Another important feature is coming too
Limits feature is already available globally to everyone on Instagram. To use it, users should go and manage it in their privacy settings. Instagram is also looking to improve its warnings on comments that may be offensive.
At this moment, Instagram displays a warning message when a user tries to post an offensive comment, based on automated detection of phrases within the comment field. If that user tries to post abusive comments more than once, Instagram will display an even stronger warning.
Instagram showed warnings during one week about a million times per day to people when they were leaving comments that were potentially offensive. In about 50% of the time, the comment was deleted or edited by the user based on these warnings.”
Even the slightest bit of friction can prompt people to re-think their comments.
Instagram is also rolling out the ‘Hidden Words’ feature for direct message requests to all users since August, after testing it over the past few months.
Users can now automatically filter DM requests which include potentially offensive phrases and emojis, which are then re-routed into a ‘Hidden’ folder.
Luckily Instagram bosses know there is more to do, including improving systems to find and then remove abusive content more quickly and holding those who post it accountable.
