Instagram will now limit reach of potentially harmful content on its platform

Instagram has been taking steps to remove the spread of harmful content on its platform. The Meta-owned photo-sharing app announced that it would reduce the visibility of potentially harmful content on its platform. Instagram said that it would deprioritize content that may incite violence, promote bullying or hate speech. Instagram is a powerful social media tool that can influence a larger audience. If any hate content or episodes of bullying are promoted on the platform, it would turn out to be harmful to the vulnerable section i.e the young users.

“In addition to removing content that goes against our Community Guidelines, we’re now taking stronger action against posts that may contain bullying or hate speech, or that. We will also show potentially upsetting posts lower in your feed based on your history of reporting content. These changes only impact individual posts, not accounts overall. As always, we only remove posts that break our rules and we tell people if their post has been removed,” the Instagram blog post read.

Instagram in its blog post states that if its systems detect posts containing bullying, hate speech, or may incite violence, the photo-sharing app will show it lower on Feeds and Stories of that person’s followers. Instagram will also remove posts that carry the same harmful captions that go against the community guidelines of the company. The Meta-owned company said that it is constantly improving its systems to be as precise as possible. “If our systems predict you’re likely to report a post based on your history of reporting content, we will show the post lower in your Feed,” Instagram says. The change will only affect individual accounts and not accounts overall.

Back in 2020, Instagram had begun downranking misleading accounts and posts. The company had said that it would downrank posts that have been debunked by fact-checkers.