Instagram is enhancing its features to make it harder for trolls to slide onto your timeline and into your DMs. We didn’t say to stop trolls entirely, we said to “make it harder.” History has proven that it’s only a matter of time before they find a loophole to slide into before spamming your timeline again.
Instagram will give you the option to block all existing accounts of a ‘person’ who may be spamming you when you block one of their accounts. That’s if it’s an actual person you’re blocking and not a bot. Well, you’ll be able to block those too.
Instagram says it wants to make it as hard as possible for someone you’ve blocked to contact you again. “Based on initial test results from this new change, we expect our community will need to block 4 million fewer accounts every week since these accounts will now be blocked automatically.”
This is in an effort to tackle abuse, including hate speech on the photo-sharing platform.
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Nudge nudge, are you sure you want to post this?
The Meta-owned platform also upgraded a feature that filters content that may be offensive or abusive. It filters offensive words in the replies and nudges you to be ‘respectful in comments and DMs’.
We’re expanding our use of nudges to encourage more people to pause and reflect before they say something that could be hurtful in comments or message requests,” says Instagram in a blog post.
You know those days when you mean to get your message across, but have run out of personal filters and end up saying something you didn’t mean to? It’s meant for those instances. It’s also meant for people who are just generally rude and have no compassion or filters. Instagram will filter them. Instagram, has had nudges to help guide its users in the past. They’re adding more because some people don’t seem to be getting the message.
“We’ve seen that nudges can reduce the amount of hurtful remarks on Instagram, which is why we’re introducing more of them,” says Instagram.
This time, you’ll get a notification that’ll encourage you to reconsider your words by setting a better tone before clicking the send button in DMs or post button in your replies to posts if Instagram’s system considers your words to be offensive.
The nudges are live for people who use English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Chinese, or Arabic on the App. For other languages, we guess you’ll just have to manually block them for now.