Online harassment is a big problem, with 40 percent of all people on the internet having reported experiencing some form of harassment online, according to Pew Research Center. In order to combat harassment on Instagram, the photo-sharing platform is gearing up to let people with “high volume content threads” filter their comment streams, or just turn them off entirely, The Washington Post reports.
For those who decide to leave on the comments, they can create a banned words list that will enable them to hide the comments that use those terms. Soon, Instagram will enable everyday people on Instagram — the ones with not as much action on their accounts — to moderate their comments.
This comes less than a month after Instagram released a comment moderation option for business pages, which similarly lets accounts block comments with certain offensive words and phrases. Here’s what the functionality looks like for business accounts
It’s also worth noting that Justin Bieber’s selfie app, Shots, basically pioneered the idea of enabling people to block comments back in 2013. In fact, the app doesn’t allow comments at all. Anyway, it’d be really cool if this was a feature on Twitter… just saying.
Instagram has been building a series of anti-harassment tools and plans to roll some of them out to all users in the coming weeks. According to The Washington Post, Instagram will let each user create their own banned words list, which will stop unwanted comments from being posted on their photos. Users may also gain the ability to turn comments off on a photo-by-photo basis, so someone could potentially disable comments entirely if they wanted to.
While harassment on Instagram hasn't been as much of a story as harassment on other social networks, like Twitter, the development of these tools is still a big deal. Online harassment is a serious issue that any network needs to deal with, period. And flexible tools like a custom banned word list can let individual users take matters into their own hands to clear up their comments section, should someone begin posting hateful or otherwise offensive or tasteless remarks.
Having to create a banned phrases list on your own, rather than being able to rely on Instagram's own filters, isn't the perfect solution, of course. It still means that any person who cares about preventing harassment on their photos — likely the very people who are already experiencing harassment on Instagram or elsewhere — are going to have to put some work into stopping it. But the fact that tools will be there at all, and the fact that banned phrases can be updated at will, is a big step forward.
Instagram has already begun testing these features with celebrities — this is very likely what Taylor Swift used to stop all those snake emoji comments. Advertisers may also have been asking for this to prevent critical commenters.
"High-volume" Instagram accounts will receive the anti-harassment features first, according to the Post. The filtering feature is supposed to appear in "the coming weeks," while Instagram is still determining whether to widely roll out the ability to disable comments. Seems like a good idea.
Update July 29th, 6:50 PM ET: Instagram is still determining exactly which features will roll out to all users. While everyone will receive some version of comment filtering, Instagram is still deciding whether to allow all users to disable comments on their photos. This story has been updated to note the uncertainty.
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