Bullying is a menace wherever you go. Most of us have experienced physical and psychological bullying. Some of it is menial and some are life-changing. It’s currently getting out of hand online too. So much so that Instagram says it took action against 1.5 million pieces of Instagram content because of bullying and harassment violations. Most of the content was reported by users and not necessarily discovered by Facebook. Many Kenyans today are either victims or perpetrators of cyber-bullying, knowingly or unknowingly. The company is now launching and testing new features aimed at making the platform a more ‘positive space’.

Instagram Fights Bullying With New Features

In a recent blog post, the company says it’s rolling out the ability to delete up to 25 comments at once. They are also introducing a way to block or restrict multiple accounts at the same time.

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We know it can feel overwhelming to manage a rush of negative comments. So we’ve been testing the ability to delete comments in bulk, as well as block or restrict multiple accounts that post negative comments.

How To Delete comments and block users

On iOS:

• Tap on a comment and then the dotted icon in the top right corner.
• Select ‘Manage Comments’ and choose up to 25 comments to delete at once.
• Tap More Options to block or restrict accounts in bulk.

On Android:

• Press and hold on a comment,
• Press the dotted icon
• Select Block or Restrict.

Highlighted by The Verge, Instagram started this fight against bullying not too long ago. It now warns users when they’re about to post a “potentially offensive” caption for a photo or video that’s being uploaded to their main feed. It also started using AI to filter offensive comments which would detect bullying in photos and captions.

On A More Positive Note

Pinned Comments

In addition to removing negative comments, we want to give people an easy way to amplify and encourage positive interactions. Soon, we’ll begin testing Pinned Comments.

People can pin multiple comments, similarly to how YouTube allows comments to be pinned to the top of the comments section below videos.

Tags and Mentions

Instagram is also giving people more control over who can tag or mention them in a post. You can select whether you want

• Everyone
• Only people they follow
• No one to be able to tag or mention them in a comment, caption, or story.

All of these features are most useful for people with large followings. Many celebrities are targeted for abuse from random users thus explains the need for Instagram to fight against online bullying.