If you use this popular social network, surely, on more than one occasion, you have received an invitation from a group of complete strangers. Groups that, in many cases, give you a bad feeling and have strange messages inside. Today we explain how you can block any strange group that you are invited to on Instagram .
Group invitations for adults on Instagram
If you have come to this article, it is because, on more than one occasion, you have received the invitation to a group full of strangers in which, in one way or another, something smelled bad to you.
These groups usually start (and practically end in this way, since it is not usual for anyone to speak in them) by a message from a user who sends a link . Sometimes this message is accompanied by some emoticons or a small text (in English or Spanish). But what you are going to find is a url that takes you from Instagram to another place.
In addition, if you access the profile of the person who sends this message (by clicking on their avatar photograph, be careful with this) you will see a very suspicious feed that usually does not have certain characteristics:
- No photos posted on the account, or several (not too many) suggestive photos of a girl.
- Profile description empty, or filled with emoticons or texts that suggest sexual content.
- A web address equal to the message you received.
These types of groups are usually created by bots in a fully automated way and can be used for 2 different functions:
- Offer paid adult content, which would be legal.
- Infect your smartphone or PC to hack your account or even steal your information.
Without a doubt, if you receive an invitation to this type of group, our recommendation is that under no circumstances click on the link you see in the message or in the administrator’s profile. This could be quite expensive, since surely you are familiar with the story of someone who had their Instagram hacked and they claim not to have done “anything weird” with their account.
In the end, those users whose objective is to steal your information will try to do so in different ways and we must be very careful not to “fall” into any of their traps.
This type of unwanted invitations can be easily avoided thanks to certain tools that Instagram puts at our fingertips. So whether you want to stop receiving “normal” group invites from strangers , or avoid those pesky “sexual content” groups on Instagram, keep reading this article.
How to avoid unknown groups on Instagram
The truth is that this process is much simpler than it may seem, but it does have certain limits. Through this social network, we can block invitations to groups by users that we do not follow . However, if we have the typical heavy friend who is always tagging us in everything, we will not be able to deny their invitation to a group if we are friends on Instagram.
Having clarified this, how can we block group invitations? Well, it will be as simple as following these steps:
- Enter the Instagram application from your mobile phone.
- Access your profile by clicking on your photo in the lower menu.
- Click on the icon of the three lines in the upper right corner.
- Now click on “Settings” .
- Scroll to the “Privacy” section and press to access the advanced options of your account.
- Click on the “Messages” section, this is where both direct messages and groups are managed.
- Once in these privacy options, go to the groups section where it gives us the option of group invitations. Here we must select the option “Only from people you follow” .
Once this setting is selected, we will stop receiving those hateful invitations with dubious intentions on our Instagram account. At the moment, as we already told you before, it is limited to profiles that we do not follow with our account but, in the future, we hope that this social network will expand the options to all users.
Why can’t I turn off group invitations?
When you access the privacy section of your Instagram account, you may not see the “Messages” menu that we mentioned a few moments ago. And this is because it is a functionality that this social network has recently decided to add and, therefore, not everyone has access to it.
In case you did not know, the news within Instagram do not come all at once. For several years now, every time the developers of this service plan to add a new feature, they “launch” it to a small group of people to analyze how they use it and if they really find it interesting. Once a certain time has passed, and if your tests are satisfactory, this news reaches all its users globally. So, if everything works correctly, we hope that the messages menu within the privacy settings will soon reach everyone.