Skip to main content

Instagram expands Sensitive Content Control feature

Instagram is letting its users have more control over the content they see in search results and in content recommendations from the popular photo and video sharing app.

On Monday, Instagram announced that starting today, it would be updating and expanding its current Sensitive Content Control feature to allow its users to have more control over how much sensitive content they see in various sections of the app, such as: Explore, Search, Reels, Accounts You Might Follow, Hashtag Pages, and feed recommendations.

Three mobile screenshots showing Instagram's newly expanded sensitive content control feature.
Instagram

The updated version of the Sensitive Content Control feature is expected to “be available to everyone in the coming weeks.” According to screenshots provided in Instagram’s announcement, the new version of this feature only filters out content from accounts you’re not following and still allows you to see all content from those you choose to follow. In terms of what “sensitive content” is, some examples that Instagram offers include “topics like drugs or firearms.”

The newly expanded feature will also offer three control options: More, Standard, and Less. More has less content restrictions and so you’ll likely see *more* sensitive content. Standard is the middle ground option that permits some sensitive content. And Less, has more content restrictions which means you’ll likely see *less* sensitive content. Users under the age of 18 won’t be able to enable the More option.

When the expanded Sensitive Content Control feature becomes available to you, here’s how to access it:

Open the Instagram mobile app. Select the Profile icon > Select the Menu icon in the top right > Select Settings > Select Account > Choose Sensitive Content Control.

Editors' Recommendations

Anita George
Anita has been a technology reporter since 2013 and currently writes for the Computing section at Digital Trends. She began…
Twitter begins rollout of new gray check marks only to abruptly remove them
Elon Musk.

In the middle of writing an article about Twitter's initial rollout of a new gray check mark verification badge, we noticed something odd: Twitter accounts that had the new gray check marks only minutes earlier were suddenly without them again. So what happened?

Elon Musk apparently happened. Mere hours after his newly purchased social media platform began its rollout of a new gray check mark in an effort to help clarify which high-profile accounts were actually verified, the new gray check marks began disappearing from various accounts, evidently at Musk's behest. Just take a look at this tweet conversation between web video producer Marques Brownlee and Musk:

Read more
Mastodon surpasses 1 million monthly active users as Twitter backlash worsens
Series of four mobile screenshots showing Mastodon's sign-up process.

Mastodon, an alternative to Twitter that's been getting a lot of attention lately, just surpassed 1 million monthly active users this week, all while Twitter struggles to deal with the  backlash caused by recently announced changes to its platform.

On Monday, Eugen Rochko, founder and CEO of Mastodon, announced via a Mastodon post that the social media platform now has "1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today." This news comes after a particularly tumultuous week (and weekend) for Twitter after Elon Musk took over the popular microblogging platform just last month.

Read more
Twitter is reportedly working on paid DMs to celebrities
The Twitter app on the Sony XPeria 5 II.

In what appears to be another effort to help Twitter generate revenue at the start of its Elon Musk era, the social media platform is reportedly working on paid Direct Messaging (DM), with a particular emphasis on those paid messages being sent to celebrities.

On Thursday, The New York Times published a report in which it mentioned that -- according to internal documents it saw and "two people with knowledge of the work" -- that Twitter was working on a paid DM feature that would allow users to send messages to celebrities for a fee. The fee structure for this feature apparently hasn't been officially finalized yet, but The Times did note that it could be "as little as a few dollars per direct message."

Read more