Back in February, Instagram shared an update on its work towards combating abuse and hate speech on Instagram. In this regard, Instagram has announced a couple of new features to protect people from seeing abusive DMs and permanently block users from reaching you using fresh accounts.
The company has introduced a new tool that will automatically filter DM requests containing offensive words, phrases, and emojis. This feature works the same way as the comment filters, which allow you to hide offensive comments.
This feature can be turned On & Off in a new dedicated section of your Privacy Settings called Hidden Words. Instagram says it has worked with anti-discrimination and anti-bullying organisations to develop a predefined list of offensive terms that will be filtered from DM requests when the feature is turned on.
Also, the DM requests that contain these offensive words, phrases, or emojis from your custom list or the predefined list, will be automatically filtered into a separate hidden requests folder. The company also clarifies that all message filtering will take place on users’ own devices, which means this feature won’t send any message content back to our servers.
This feature will be rolled out in the upcoming day only in the selected countries. However, the feature will eventually reach everyone over the next few months, claims the company.
Secondly, the company is working on a feature that permanently blocks users from reaching you using fresh accounts. With this feature, whenever you decide to block someone on Instagram, you’ll have the option to both block their account and preemptively block new accounts that person may create. This will be available globally in the next few weeks.