Following the cyberbullying that was meted out on Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, and Jadon Sancho who are black England football players after they lost Euro 2020 final against Italy, Instagram has introduced some safety features to stop this from happening again.
One of the features is Limits, once turned on, prevents anyone who doesn’t follow you, or who recently followed you, from commenting or sending a DM. The company indicated that it’s also “exploring ways” to preemptively suggest that people turn this feature on when it detects a spike in activity which could be an attempt at cyberbullying.
The hidden words feature allows people to automatically filter DMs with offensive words, phrases, and emoji, relegating them to a hidden folder. The feature now has a wider list of potentially offensive words, emoji, and hashtags. Also, the app is issuing sterner warnings to people who try to post offensive comments.
Instagram had this to say about the features, “We hope these new features will better protect people from seeing abusive content, whether it’s racist, sexist, homophobic or any other type of abuse. We know there’s more to do, including improving our systems to find and remove abusive content more quickly, and holding those who post it accountable.”