It has become common nature to voice your opinions on social networks, whether they are nice comments or mean comments is another story. However, it might only be sunshine and butterflies from here on out as Instagram combats hate. Instagram is combatting the hateful and “toxic” comments with their new feature. This feature uses a filtering system to determine offensive comments and spam in nine different languages.
Users can access this feature in Instagram settings. You can turn the filter on or off. It is up to you what comments you want to be subjected to. Instagram is hoping to make the platform a safer and friendlier place. They believe that this will encourage people to use the app more. Celebrities have been on the receiving end when it comes to hate and Instagram is hoping this will benefit them as well. Apparently, Miley Cyrus visited Instagram headquarters and voiced her concern by threatening to leave the social network if nothing was done.
This feature will be like Facebook’s ‘hide’ comments option where the writer can see their comment but no one else can. The difference is it hides the comments automatically you don’t have to go in and manually hide all offensive comments. This is a very interesting feature; a machine must learn what counts what is an offensive comment and what doesn’t. It has been a long journey to get to the point where we can even have a software like this. It started with paid humans going in and manually marking comments as spam. Those humans are what assisted in building the algorithms that can sort through comments. This new feature probably won’t be perfect right away, but at least we know Instagram is looking out for us by combatting hate.
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