Instagram to roll out anti-harassment tools

Online harassment is a big problem, with 40 percent of all people on the internet having reported experiencing some form of harassment online, according to Pew Research Center. In order to combat harassment on Instagram, the photo-sharing platform is gearing up to let people with “high volume content threads” filter their comment streams, or just turn them off entirely, The Washington Post reports.

For those who decide to leave on the comments, they can create a banned words list that will enable them to hide the comments that use those terms. Soon, Instagram will enable everyday people on Instagram — the ones with not as much action on their accounts — to moderate their comments.

This comes less than a month after Instagram released a comment moderation option for business pages, which similarly lets accounts block comments with certain offensive words and phrases. Here’s what the functionality looks like for business accounts:

It’s also worth noting that Justin Bieber’s selfie app, Shots, basically pioneered the idea of enabling people to block comments back in 2013. In fact, the app doesn’t allow comments at all. Anyway, it’d be really cool if this was a feature on Twitter… just saying.

Source: TechCrunch