Instagram to Disable Accounts Sending Hateful Messages via DMs
Stiffening its attitude on hate speech in private messages, the popular social networking giant Instagram has recently announced that it will start disabling accounts of users sending hateful DMs to other users over and over again. At the moment, when a user sends messages that go against the company’s guidelines, the platform forbids the user from sending any more DMs for a given time frame.
However, in a recent statement, the company announced that from now on, if a user continues to send messages that violate the platform’s policies, they will disable the account of that particular user. Further adding to their statement, the company said that it would also disable new accounts made to dodge or escape the company’s messaging restrictions and continue disabling accounts found to be created solely to send abusive and hateful DMs to others on the platform.
The company also revealed that it has begun rolling out more controls to private accounts in numerous countries, and they expect to make these new features available to all users very soon. According to Instagram, users can opt to turn off mentions and tags from unknown users and block any user bothering them with unpleasant DMs.
Instagram announced these new updates after it observed users targeting racist online abuse at footballers in the UK. Referring to this incident, the company strictly said that it does not want this kind of behavior on Instagram. Considering that Instagram DMs are meant for private conversations on the platform, the company does not use technology to proactively spot content such as bullying or hate speech as it does in other places such as comment sections and posts.
Last year, between the month of July and September, Instagram took strict actions on more than 6 million content pieces of hate speech on the platform, including those sent in direct messages. Furthermore, the company also added that it is committed to cooperating with the UK law enforcement authorities on hate speech. Therefore it will respond to official legal petitions for information in these cases.
Instagram announced a new feature last year to allow users to manage numerous unwanted comments all at once – whether it’s bulk removing those comments or bulk blocking the users who posted them.
Wrapping It Up
In a recent announcement, Instagram said that it would start disabling accounts of users who repeatedly send hateful or abusive messages to other platform users, and we are “heart” ing this decision already! While currently, people who sent DMs that violated the company’s guidelines were forbidden from sending messages for a set time frame, from now onwards, such users will end up getting their accounts disabled. And that’s not all. Adding to its statement, the company mentioned that it would continue to disable new accounts that are created with the sole purpose of escaping the platform’s messaging restrictions and accounts made to send hateful messages to other users. This announcement came out after the company witnessed racist online abuse targeted at footballers in the UK. Instagram clearly stated that this sort of behavior would not be acceptable on its platform anymore.