Social media moderation is an important task. Every day social media platforms deal with new problems and issues that their users face. Companies like Facebook and Instagram are working on user security for some time now. Interestingly Instagram is now deploying a new feature that will hide potentially offensive comments on the platform.
A while back Facebook and Instagram rolled out a new feature that hid potentially disturbing photos and videos behind a warning. Since social media is getting users exponentially features like these are really important for classifying online content. Not only will that decrease misinformation. It will also decrease hate speech on the platforms.
Coming back to the topic, Instagram has now opted for a new feature to block or hide offensive comments that users leave behind. The algorithm will work by identifying comments similar to what users flag as offensive. It will hide any such comments but will not remove them from the platform. Users will still be able to view the comments via an option, just like the hidden photos option. There will a dedicated option titled something like ‘Tap to view Hidden Comments’ in the application after the feature rolls out.
You can say that in a way this feature is the expansion of the hide comment feature that came to the app a while back. While the older features required users to manually hide offensive comments from them. This new algorithm will do it for them. Instagram also plans to take user warnings a step further. They will now work even more in this area to notify people every time they try to post something offensive.
The application will keep a record of your activities and will give you repeated warnings when you try to post something that goes against their guidelines.
New Comment Moderation:
The Facebook-owned company said that they want users to strictly adhere to community guidelines. They will actively remove any of the comments involving hate speech and offensive content form the platform. A big reason for these new moderation features is increasing pressure on Facebook, the parent company of Instagram. Facebook has recently received a lot of criticism because of how they handle free speech and hate speech on the platform. There is a fine line between these two things and the applications have failed to identify that numerous times.
An independent audit is done on Facebook recently revealed how the platform is deliberately failing to come up with a mechanism to conserve civil rights. Facebook has never claimed responsibility for hast speech on its platform and always blames it on the users. this study was done after a lot of advertisers boycotted their use of Facebook. The Democratic National Committee released a memo, highlighting the points this platform has failed to work on.
Because of this increasing awareness and pressure on the company. Facebook announced in August that they have removed 22.5 million posts containing hate speech in the second quarter of the year alone. They said that this number shows how serious they are about user security. Previously Facebook had only removed about 9.6 million posts in the first half of this year. Coming to Instagram now they removed about 3.3 million instances of hateful behavior from users in the second three months of this year compared to 0.8 million in the first three.
Facebook and Instagram are currently in a lot of criticism. Instagram recently had a lawsuit for spying on people. It is therefore essential that these applications develop these regulations before they scare away too many of their users.