Social networks are a tool that allows us to do a large number of things: from obtaining information to publishing what we want, among many other things such as making purchases. However, one of its problems is that many of its users take advantage of the anonymity of their accounts to attack others, giving themselves situations of abuse that should not happen. There are indications that can let us know if a profile on Instagram is false, since these accounts usually carry out this type of attack. There are many accounts that have disappeared from different platforms for carrying out activities of this type. Instagram has announced a series of new measures as a method for users to defend themselves from situations of abuse on this social network.
These are three new functionalities : limiting comments and requests to send direct messages at times of high attention, the appearance of warnings when publishing offensive content and the implementation of a new function called Hidden Words, to filter requests for private messages that are abusive.
New measures with abuse and offensive content
With these new measures, Instagram hopes to protect its users from situations of abuse and even prevent many people from experiencing this for the first time, since for them the well-being of their users is very important.
The limit comments feature will help prevent comments or direct message requests from people we don’t follow or have recently followed us.
This happens especially with influencers or world-renowned people who, depending on what they do, see their latest publication as full of new comments, even if it was uploaded days ago. This accumulation of comments can happen for both good and bad things.
For example, in the last European Championship we saw how players Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka missed the decisive penalties that made England lose the tournament. This caused the Instagram profiles of these three players to be filled with racist and hateful comments.
Therefore, this new function will help to avoid these unpleasant situations. The function will allow you without problems to continue maintaining contact with our community of followers, but can limit these users who only seek to create hatred.
The function is now available and can be activated or deactivated from the settings tab. If you have it deactivated and you suffer a high number of comments or direct messages, the application itself will recommend that you activate the function if you wish.
A safer social network
Instagram already displayed a warning if you posted an offensive comment, warning that you violated its community rules. Before this notice was produced to the second or third comment, but now it will be done from the first.
These warnings can cause these users who want to post offensive content to edit the comment or directly or publish it.
The Hidden Words functionality will allow users to choose certain words, emoticons or phrases that they do not want to see. In addition, it will also filter direct messages that are spam or poor quality.
This feature is only available right now in some countries but is expected to be available worldwide by the end of August.
So, let’s hope that with these new measures, Instagram will be an even safer social network and one in which offensive or hateful episodes will no longer be produced due to some comments.