Instagram Now Filters Out Abusive DMs, Block People

Instagram says it has introduced some new tools that will eradicate the use of abusive DMs based on keywords and emojis to block people even on new accounts.

The photo and video-sharing social networking service introduced a new way for people to further shield themselves from harassment in their direct messages, especially in message requests by way of a new set of words, phrase and emojis that might signal abusive content, which will also include common misspellings of those key terms, sometimes used to try to evade the filters.

It also gives users the ability to proactively block people even if they try to contact the user in question over a new account.

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Instagram said that the new features will be available globally in the next few weeks and it confirmed to Techcrunch that the features to filter out abusive DMs will start rolling out in the UK, France, Germany, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in a few weeks’ time before becoming available in more countries over the next few months.

Facebook other two popular apps that enable direct messaging-Messenger and WhatsApp_ are left out. The spokesperson confirmed that Facebook hopes to bring it to other apps in the stable later this year. (Instagram and others have regularly issued updates on single apps before considering how to roll them out more widely.)

The company was clear to point out that this new feature does not scan but will be based on a list of words and emojis that Facebook compiles with the help of antidiscrimination and anti-bullying organisations – no specifications – along with terms and emoji’s that you might add in yourself. And it has to be turned on preemptively, rather than being made available by default.

a spokesperson said, pointing out that this is similar to how its comment filters also work. “We want to respect peoples’ privacy and give people control over their experiences in a way that works best for them.” It will live in Settings>Privacy>Hidden Words for those who will want to turn on the control.

There are a number of third-party services out there in the wild now building content moderation tools that sniff out harassment and hate speech — they include the likes of Sentropy and Hive — but what has been interesting is that the larger technology companies up to now have opted to build these tools themselves. That is also the case here, the company confirmed.

The system is completely automated, although Facebook noted that it reviews any content that gets reported. While it doesn’t keep data from those interactions, it confirmed that it will be using reported words to continue building its bigger database of terms that will trigger content getting blocked, and subsequently deleting, blocking and reporting the people who are sending it.

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On the subject of those people, it’s been a long time coming that Facebook has started to get smarter on how it handles the fact that the people with really ill intent have wasted no time in building multiple accounts to pick up the slack when their primary profiles get blocked. People have been aggravated by this loophole for as long as DMs have been around, even though Facebook’s harassment policies had already prohibited people from repeatedly contacting someone who doesn’t want to hear from them, and the company had already also prohibited recidivism, which as Facebook describes it, means “if someone’s account is disabled for breaking our rules, we would remove any new accounts they create whenever we become aware of it.”

The company’s approach to Direct Messages has been something of a template for how other social media companies have built these out.

In essence, they are open-ended by default, with one inbox reserved for actual contacts, but a second one for anyone at all to contact you. While some people just ignore that second box altogether, the nature of how Instagram works and is built is for more, not less, contact with others, and that means people will use those second inboxes for their DMs more than they might, for example, delve into their spam inboxes in email.

The bigger issue continues to be a game of whack-a-mole, however, and one that not just its users are asking for more help to solve. As Facebook continues to find itself under the scrutinizing eye of regulators, harassment — and better management of it — has emerged as a very key area that it will be required to solve before others do the solving for it.