Instagram has announced a new tool that will allow users to automatically filter out direct message requests that contain offensive words, phrases and emoticons. This tool is aimed at celebrities and public figures who receive a large amount of unsolicited and offensive direct messages.<\/p>\n
The update is part of Instagram’s efforts to tackle hate speech on the platform.\u00a0In February, the company said it would begin deactivating user accounts that sent multiple hate messages.\u00a0In 2018, the company expanded its offensive comment filter to automatically block comments that were critical of a person’s appearance or personality.<\/p>\n
The Send Message Filter can be turned on or off in a new section of the application called Hidden words.\u00a0When enabled, offensive messages will be placed in a separate folder.\u00a0Direct messages in this folder are hidden, allowing users to view messages without having to read offensive content.\u00a0If a user clicks on a post, they can read, delete, or report it.<\/p>\n
The company says it worked with “leading anti-discrimination and bullying organizations” to compile a predefined list of offensive phrases.\u00a0Users can also customize their own list based on what they don’t want to see.<\/p>\n
According to Instagram, the new feature will be rolled out to \u201cmultiple countries\u201d in the coming weeks.\u00a0However, the company did not elaborate on the list of specific countries.\u00a0Instagram plans to expand the scope of this feature to other countries in the next few months.<\/p>\n
As part of today’s announcement, Instagram also announced that it is starting to roll out another tool to help protect users from abuse and harassment.\u00a0This feature will allow people to proactively block new accounts of stalkers.\u00a0Now, when a user blocks someone in the application, they will have the option to also block any new accounts created by that same person.\u00a0The company declined to specify how it works, stating only that it uses “different signals” to discover new accounts for the same users.\u00a0This feature will launch globally in the next few weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Instagram has announced a new tool that will allow users to automatically filter out direct message requests that contain offensive words, phrases and emoticons. This tool is aimed at celebrities and public figures who receive a large amount of unsolicited and offensive direct messages. The update is part of Instagram’s efforts to tackle hate speech […] More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10404,"featured_media":129331,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[805],"tags":[779],"class_list":{"0":"post-129330","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-news"},"acf":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10404"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129330\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stereoindex.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}