Instagram will improve features that will help users block the accounts of criminals and trolls on the social media platform, a company owned by Meta Platforms said on Thursday.
All Instagram users will now be able to block all of a person’s existing accounts, expanding on a feature launched last year that only allowed to block any new accounts they might create.
“Based on the results of preliminary testing of this new change, we expect our community to have to block 4 million fewer accounts each week, as these accounts will now be automatically blocked,” Instagram said in a blog post.
The photo-sharing app doubles down on the fight against hate speech and online abuse on its platform, which is more popular with teens and young adults than Facebook Meta.
Instagram also updated its feature to help prevent potentially offensive messages from being seen by filtering out offensive words in Stories replies, and said Thursday that it was expanding “reminders” to protect creators from harassment.
As developed by the social media company in its blog post, it has updated features to allow users to block on Instagram. Thanks to this feature, the user has the option to block multiple accounts created by a specific person. It also blocks existing accounts that the person may already have.
The company also added an update to Hidden Words, introduced last year, that allows users to save responses to stories that are offensive in nature. Also, inappropriate responses from people you don’t follow will automatically be sent to the Hidden Requests folder.
Additionally, hidden word support has been extended to several other new languages, including Persian, Russian, Turkish, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil.
Besides, Instagram will also display a community guidelines request when a user attempts to message the creator. This practice is to eliminate offensive words.