Instagram Takes One Step Further Towards Fighting Against Bullying by Implementing a New Feature
According to the information posted on Instagram’s Info Center, the company is about to implement a new feature that will notify people in cases when their photo or video captions are considered to be offensive.
Starting today, we’re rolling out a new feature that notifies people when their captions may be considered offensive, and gives them a chance to pause and reconsider their words before posting.
— Instagram (@instagram) December 16, 2019
Learn more: https://t.co/J6etoRmznr pic.twitter.com/C4VxlZOY2i
This feature is based on a similar one that Instagram introduced back in July, and that was aimed at fighting against online bullying as well. That feature was designed to notify people before posting comments that might be harmful or offensive.
Instagram team has discovered that such changes are beneficial to the community as they encourage people to reflect upon what they were going to write and possibly change their word choice.
Starting December 16, the users of the Facebook-owned company will get warnings if they are about to write a caption with potentially offensive wording. The users will get a chance to edit their captions before finally posting them; however, they will also be able to leave them as they are. The AI developed by Instagram can recognize offensive words by comparing them to those that people reported earlier.
Today, when someone writes a caption for a feed post and our AI detects the caption as potentially offensive, they will receive a prompt informing them that their caption is similar to those reported for bullying. They will have the opportunity to edit their caption before it’s posted.
At first, the feature will be implemented in several countries that have not been mentioned yet. Soon it will expand worldwide.