Instagram, like other social media platforms, is faced with online harassment and bullying. The photo and video sharing platform is, however, rolling out more new tools to help in its fight against bullying.
One of the new features which announced yesterday includes the ability to delete multiple negative comments at once. Through this, Instagram users can select up to 25 comments to delete at once.
Instagram is also letting users control who can tag and mention them in posts. It will be beneficial in helping combat bullying via its tagging feature.
“We’ve seen that tags and mentions can be used to target or bully others, so we’re rolling out new controls that allow you to manage who can tag or mention you on Instagram,” the company said in a blog post.
There are three options for controlling who can tag you: everyone, only people you follow, or no one. When you restrict being tagged, this will apply across the comment section, captions, and also in Stories.
Apart from combatting bullying, Instagram wants to foster positive interactions. One feature aiming at that is Pinned Comments. Pinned Comments will let users pin the most important comments at the top of the comment section. The feature is not yet available at the moment, but the company plans to introduce it “soon.”
Despite launching the fight against bullying in the past, the company has never released stats on the same. But thanks to the latest Community Standards Enforcement report, we have a chance to see how they’re fairing on. In the October 2019 to March 2020 period, the Facebook-owned platform said it took down 1.5 million pieces of content flagged as bullying and harassment.
Instagram already has several features aimed at curbing cyberbullying like Restrict, which lets you restrict unwanted interactions. The AI Rethink Tool is another feature that scans users’ replies in real-time and advises then to sanitize them if necessary.
