Instagram has just announced a series of measures aimed at reducing hate on its platform, in particular by making “potentially harmful” content less visible in its application.
Instagram has no never been an example when it comes to moderating hate speech. A whistleblower had recently announced that Facebook was encouraging online hate to make a profit. The app is said to have such a significant negative impact on young people that Instagram has added a new feature offering teenagers to take a break to preserve their sanity.
In a blog post, Instagram has detailed its new measures which it believes will reduce toxicity on its app. In particular, the company indicates that the algorithm that powers the way posts are ordered in users’ activity feeds and in Stories will now deprioritize content that ” may contain bullying, hate speech or may incite violence “.
Instagram wants to hide sensitive content
With its new measure to hide hate messages at the bottom of your News Feed, Instagram wants to reduce the reach and engagement of this type of content, although history shows that this approach usually does not work. In theory, therefore, you will soon have to spend a little more time on the Facebook platform before seeing a hateful or offensive post.
The social network claims to remove all posts that violate its policy, so this measure will only be applied to messages that are suspected of being toxic. This new measure will only impact individual messages, not accounts as a whole. Thereby, the account will not be penalized as a whole, only the offending message will disappear at the bottom of your newsfeed.
The social network also specifies that the publications that you are likely to report (based on your previous reports) will also appear further down in your News Feed. Instagram had recently taken another step to combat online hate. Indeed, the social network is now able to automatically filter offensive private messages.
Source: instagram
