So in its latest effort to keep the site clean and its burgeoning community happy, the company will soon roll out new tools thatโll let users switch on word and phrase filters to reduce the chances of a rude comment appearing in the discussion beneath their photo. Itโll also be possible to turn off comments altogether on a post-by-post basis.
Instagram’s head of public policy, Nicky Jacksonย Colaco, told the Washington Post this week that the phot0-sharing siteโs goal is to become a โfriendly, fun and, most importantly, safe place for self-expression,โ with the new comment-related tools aimed at taking it toward its objective.
Colaco said the company has already started testing the feature with high-volume comment threads โ read that as celebrity accounts โ giving those users the power to shape the tone of conversations linked to each image.
The new tools sound similar to the ones recently rolled out for business users. Besides the comment controls, the Facebook-owned company also uses a system of banned hashtags to prevent offenders promoting suspect images on the site, while an in-house team works to remove those images when it finds them.
Colaco didnโt offer a timeline for when the new comment options will be rolled out to regular users of the site, but the fact that heโs already speaking publicly about the feature suggests we shouldnโt have to wait too long.
The battle to keep their services free from offensive material and disruptive trolls is proving to be one of the greatest challenges for social media companies, with some handling the tricky matter better than others. In early 2015, for example, internal emails revealed Twitterโsย frustrations at its failure to deal effectively with trolls. Since then, the company has taken significant steps to up its game in this area, although clearly thereโs still plenty of work to do.
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