Everyone who uses social media knows that while it’s an honest place to share ideas and communicate with friends and family, social media is additionally where rampant abuse can happen. As a result, Instagram has announced that it’s adding new features to its service to assist protect users from abuse. Instagram says it’s a responsibility to make sure people feel safe while using the service.
A new set of features are being revealed to build up protections for users of the social network. The new protections include the power to limit comments and DM requests during episodes of increased attention, stronger warnings when users attempt to post comments deemed offensive, and therefore the global availability of Hidden Words.
The first of the features is named Limits, and users can turn it on to automatically hide comments and DM requests from users who don’t follow them or only recently followed them. The feature may respond to complaints Instagram has had from users about comments and DM requests from people they don’t know. Most negativity towards users comes from people that don’t follow them or only recently followed them, consistent with Instagram. Limits is out there for everybody, not just public figures, and have unrolled globally.
While Instagram currently shows a warning if someone tries to post potentially offensive comments, it typically shows escalating warnings with strongly worded warnings shown as long as the user posts potentially offensive comments for the second or third time. With the change to warnings, the strongly worded warning will happen after the primary time a user tries to post a potentially offensive comment. Users are shown the strongly worded warning edit or delete the comment 50 percent of the time.
Hidden Words allows users to automatically filter any offensive word, phrase, or emojis from posting comments to their content. The feature is additionally ready to filter any DM request that appears to be spam. Instagram previously launched Hidden Words in certain countries, but it’s now rolling out globally. The feature also gets a replacement “Hide More Comments” choice to hide comments that don’t break community guidelines but could be harmful.
