Bullying is unfortunately one of the evils of society and it has become more widespread onto social media platforms since it’s getting increasingly easier to hide behind keyboards and computer screens.
Instagram is well-aware that bullying can cause other ancillary problems to the users who have to deal with it and it also knows it makes an appearance across its platform as well, so it has decided to add up some new countermeasures.
One of these measures is the Restrict option which will allow the users to protect their accounts in a more subtle way.
“Bullying is a complex issue, and we know that young people face a disproportionate amount of online bullying but are reluctant to report or block peers,” Instagram said in a blog post.
All the users have to do is swipe left on the comment in question, go to the Privacy tab in Settings and restrict the users who are causing them trouble. Once that happens, their comments on the user’s posts will only be visible to the bully and they won’t even be aware that they’re basically talking to an empty room and no one is reading their words.
In addition to that, these users won’t see when you are active on Instagram or if you’ve even read their Direct Messages – in fact, their messages will be moved to Message Request instead.
If you want to talk to this person again, you can just choose to ‘Unrestrict’ their account and you’ll receive all your messages and comments as usual.
“It’s our responsibility to create a safe environment on Instagram,” Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri wrote in a blog post a while ago. “This has been an important priority for us for some time, and we are continuing to invest in better understanding and tackling this problem.”
Instagram also introduced a new algorithm that is trained to detect if someone is being harassed in photos or captions. If it thinks it has found any proof of that, the algorithm sends the content in question to the Community Operations team for a review.
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