In a way, you should feel lucky that Facebook owns Instagram. Pause a little and think about all the investments Facebook has made on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies. Now, all that resources are available to Instagram without restrictions.
We can see that in the announcement Instagram made yesterday. The photo-centric social media platform announced new anti-cyberbullying features that will make the platform more friendly for most people; except for the bullies of course.
Instagram will be deploying ML bots to scan photos posted, and if it suspects bullying, it will send the post to a community of moderators the social media has on standby to review the post. It will mean bullies will no longer have a platform on Instagram to harass other users. Though this is not the first time, the social network is setting up anti-cyberbullying measures.
It all along had text filters for bullying, but one can easily bypass that by putting them inside a picture. By either writing down defamatory notes, take a picture, and post on Instagram. In such cases, it would have been hard for anti-cyberbullying measures set by Instagram to pick that up; because they relied on filtering out bullying in texts, not pictures of text.
The newly appointed head of the social network, Adam Mosseri wrote in a blog post: “There is no place for bullying on Instagram… As the new Head of Instagram, I’m proud to build on our commitment to making Instagram a kind and safe community for everyone.”
Users will now start seeing the ‘Hide Offensive Comments’ option, which is turned on by default. Users will also have the option of adding more offensive words on the screening list, so that whenever someone uses them to comment on their posts. Those comments will be automatically hidden.
Instagram is launching a ‘Kindness’ camera with Maddie Ziegler as the ambassador. Ziegler is best known as Sia’s child dancer from the music video ‘Chandelier.’ That is just part of a wide compaign to curb bullying on Instagram, including during Live broadcasts.
