Fighting racism on social media
Instagram is introducing stricter measures to fight racism including removing the accounts of people who send abusive messages and developing new controls to reduce the abuse people see in their Direct Messages.
“We know that, just like in the offline world, there will always be those who abuse others. We’ve seen it most recently with racist online abuse targeted at footballers in the UK. We don’t want this behaviour on Instagram”, the company said in a blog.
“Currently, when someone sends DMs that break our rules, we prohibit that person from sending any more messages for a set period of time. Now, if someone continues to send violating messages, we’ll disable their account. We’ll also disable new accounts created to get around our messaging restrictions, and will continue to disable accounts we find that are created purely to send abusive messages.”
The company said personal accounts will be able to switch off DMs from people they do not follow. This option is available in many countries and Instagram said it hopes to offer it to everyone soon. People can also choose to turn off tags or mentions from anyone they don’t know or block anyone who sends them unwanted messages.
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