Though the internet has brought so many positive changes to our daily life, there has been some of the hazardous effects of the same as well. Cyberbullying is one such bad situation that has been promoted on many on the social media platforms, and people are getting affected by this mentally. The owner of these social media platforms are well aware and have been thinking of new ways to put a restriction on the bullies.
Instagram, one of the top social media platforms, is no different and have been facing the same bullying stuff. The company has taken proper measures for stopping such activities on the platform. It has already set up a team of moderators as well to keep an eye on the daily comments. But still, with the everyday bullying, it has not been able to keep up with it and has been a part of major criticism. In July this year, the company took another step to handle cyberbullying and introduced the beta of a new feature, named Restrict, that would help the content creators to hide the hate comments on their posts.
Today, the company announced that the very feature will now be available to the general public, and people will be able to shadowban the users and their comments including the hate speech. Being shadowbanned means that the user making the hate comment will have no idea that his/her comment has been restricted, and no one else, other than them, can see the comment after it has been made hidden.
To restrict a hate comment, the user needs to swipe left on that very comment. If the person continues to post such comments on other posts as well the user can directly go to the person’s profile and restrict all their comments. The feature will also keep the bullies from seeing if the user who has restricted them is ever active. The feature is similar to the Mute feature from Twitter, thus, won’t block the user entirely. This way, the bullies can still send the users direct messages, but these messages will go to the message request folder of the recipient. With the feature, even if the user has read the message, the bullies cannot see if the user has seen the message or not.
“Bullying is a complex issue, and we know that young people face a disproportionate amount of online bullying but are reluctant to report or block peers who bully them,” Instagram said, “Restrict is designed to empower you to quietly protect your account while still keeping an eye on the bully.”
Instagram has been the favourites of not only the teens, but the celebrities also like to post their daily pictures and events on it, as it has got the most active audience. But there is no one who has not faced hate speech on their account and is unable to fight it completely. Instagram has already got the blocking the user feature on it. And now, with new restrict feature, there may be some hope the users for fighting against the bullies.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.