With its popularity increasing day by day, social media is getting crowded as never before. More and more users are joining the digital space, even with multiple accounts of a single person. Not only has online engagement improved, but the occurrence of online abuse on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter also has increased at an alarming rate. This does not define the purpose of social media in any way.
Human beings are considered as social animals, who engage with each other for a lifetime. Social media is the new digital version of society that remains as an umbrella platform for online engagement. Given the fact that society, of any kind, does not encourage abuse or hatred, online platforms have been taking many steps to avoid this. Instagram has been introducing a set of new features to control and eliminate online abuses and hate speeches.
Instagram is coming up with a Limits feature that will automatically hide DM requests and comments from accounts that you don’t follow, or have followed only very recently. The idea is to avoid the spike of unwanted or abusive messages that end up in your inbox. This makes it easy to filter important messages and reply to them only. Avoiding abusive messages and comments will lead to better mental health for both normal individuals and celebrities. According to your preference. Limits feature can be turned on or off from the Instagram settings option. Updations to this feature are in queue so that Instagram can detect when DMs and comments are increasing, and recommend the user to turn on the Limits feature.
Hidden Words is another feature that is introduced to eliminate abusive DM requests. With this feature, offensive messages and emojis can be filtered and transferred into a hidden folder. This also eliminates spam requests that trash up in your inbox. The Hidden Words feature has been introduced in some of the countries and is expected to be available to the global Instagram community by the end of this month. This feature will be of great help for both individual users and celebrities who have a huge amount of followers so that they do not have to deal with spam and abusive content.
Another new Instagram feature is ‘Hide Comments’, which helps us to hide comments which may not be against the community guidelines but can be potentially harmful to the community in the future. Apart from a warning sign that will be displayed when someone posts abusive comments, reminders for the community guidelines of Instagram will also be shown. This will not technically stop them from posting such comments but will make the user think twice before posting them.
Any social media, be it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other digital platform, is not the place to spread abuse and hatred. With the cuber rules becoming stronger day by day, one must think carefully because posting such content on social media. As a precaution, we must also make use of such protective features to prevent any kind of abuse or potential threats on our social media handles.
