Instagram will try to hide “potentially harmful” content

In the vast cyber jungle we call The Internet there are potential threats lurking in every dark corner, every thick bush. Now, dramatic preludes aside, there is a lot of bad content around the web – such as the pornography that spam bots were peddling on Instagram.

The popular social network has been constantly testing new methods to filter potentially harmful content, and even halted the development of Instagram Kids, following recent backlash. Now the company has shared another slew of changes on its official blog, aimed to limit the visibility of potentially harmful content.

Here’s a breakdown of all the changes:

• Instagram will continue to remove content that goes against its Community Guideline, but now posts that may contain bullying or hate speech, or that may encourage violence, will be shown further down in Feed and Stories.
• Instagram will down-rank potentially upsetting posts in your Feed based on your history of reporting content.
• These changes only impact individual posts, not accounts overall. Instagram will also note the violators why their posts have been removed.

Instagram already has algorithms in place to flag harmful content but now the company is targeting borderline posts and potential gray zones. “To understand if something may break our rules, we’ll look at things like if a caption is similar to a caption that previously broke our rules,” Instagram wrote in an update.

The second bullet point in the changelog means that Instagram will try to predict the posts you’re likely to report and preemptively down-rank them in your Feed.

It’s also worth noting that up until now Instagram algorithms have tried to hide harmful content from parts of the app visible to the public users, such as Explore. With the aforementioned changes in place, these posts will also be down-ranked for users following the account posting such content. The changes are already in effect, so be careful what you post, guys and girls!