IG Testing A New Function Which Will Help Defend Against Haters & Hate Comments


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Instagram is a wonderful place to be in, especially if you want to boost your ego.

After all, that’s where you see the most compliments:

  • Omg, your smile is so beautiful.
  • Great Feed!
  • Your pictures are the greatest!

But just as with anything, there’s always another side to it.

The bullies.

Image: Instagram

And they’re everywhere.

Image: Instagram

Which hurts.

Image: Giphy

If you’ve always wanted to make Instagram your home but is unable to deal with haters, I’ve got good news for you.

Instagram Is Doing Something About It

Meet Shadow Ban.

He’s probably the virtual superhero that everyone living on Instagram needs. And his superpower? Getting rid of those annoying cyberbullies who can’t live their lives without putting somebody down.

Anybody.

It’s not in the app yet but the team behind Instagram is going to launch a beta for it soon.

Shadow Ban Abilities

When you “shadow ban” a user, it means when they comment on your post, it’ll only be visible to their own accounts.

Image: Instagram

Kind of like the “hide comment” function on Facebook.

But what more, the account you’ve shadow-banned will not be able to see if you’re active on Instagram, or whether you’ve read a direct message from them.

There’s More

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the rage right now. And Instagram’s using it on their app as well.

The team is testing AI-comment-flagging.


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Image: Instagram

A user posting “potentially-offensive” comments will be asked if they really want to put it online.

Will it work? Nobody knows because we all know haters gonna hate.

But Instagram revealed that during their tests, “some” people actually stopped and thought about their actions before aborting their self-given mission.

Other Features That Were Tested

The two features above are just the latest in line on anti-bullying features for Instagram.

One such feature is the offensive comment filter which allows Instagram to automatically remove nasty remarks.


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While simple at the beginning, their system has now learned to identify not just keywords, but take into account a (simple) context of the reply.

Similar to the “shadow-ban”, the account user won’t know he has been blocked because the comment will still be visible to him or her.

They have a similar feature for photos and captions as well last year.

Will this be a perfect solution? I doubt because we all know haters are tenacious if nothing else.

But will this help? We do hope so.

What do you think?


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