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Social media app Instagram is planning to launch a new feature that allows its users personalized control over the comments shared on each of their posts.
The company has long had blanket rules for what constitutes appropriate speech on its network, but the new comment filter ability will let each user tweak specific rules to their own liking, since "different words or phrases are offensive to different people" (via The Washington Post).
Some businesses have already gotten a look at the new feature, letting them automatically weed out comments and posters with specific triggering phrases. In the next few weeks, more "high-profile accounts" will get their hands on comment moderation, with the ability to also switch comments off completely on a post-by-post basis.
“Our goal is to make Instagram a friendly, fun and, most importantly, safe place for self expression," said Instagram's head of public policy, Nicky Jackson Colaco, in a statement to The Post. "We have slowly begun to offer accounts with high volume comment threads the option to moderate their comment experience. As we learn, we look forward to improving the comment experience for our broader community.”
Normal users will have to wait a while longer to moderate their own posts, since Instagram said it will launch the feature to all its users "in the coming months." The company is planning on using feedback from higher-volume accounts to fine tune the new feature before handing it out to its more than 300 million daily active users.
Instagram is available for free on the App Store. [Direct Link]
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Top Rated Comments
(View all)it would be nice to get an iPad app too...
HAHAHAHAHA oh man so true and so funny. Yet for some reason it isn't deemed a priority over there....Don't post them in the first place.
Complete truth.Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the sad truth is that anything posted online can be copied. If you wish to preserve ownership, the only thing to do is to keep them offline, I'm sad to say.
Hurray for fascism
Hurray for a lack of education!I think a common problem with super popular simple services like Insta is that you can't filter your own feed in any way.
I'm not sure, but Instagram is an interesting one. If I like one of my friends holiday photos, because of the tags they use I can occasionally have fairly revealing photos of strangers come up on the Search tab marked as "Based on Photos You Liked" ... Leaves a great impression with the other half, I can tell you!Personally I will unfollow you even if I like you as a person because the images you post regularly annoy me. I'm being forced to filter in that way.
Recently I made a second account for posting skateboarding related content and I follow more liberally on that account as it is more of a promotional type account than a personal representation of my life. Having two accounts has been nice because I have two feeds I can look through, a filtered, and unfiltered feed.
Is providing filtering for the end user a challenge in some way or do you people here think that it's just generally a thing that doesn't really benefit the corporation providing the service?