While Instagram has been cracking down on harmful content on their platform, there is still room for improvement when it comes to those that are considered “potentially harmful” only. The Meta-owned social media platform is announcing how they are addressing these content on users’ feeds and stories. Basically, they will be showing less of these based on your history of reporting similar content. Of course, if you still see posts that you consider harmful, you can always report and see if Instagram will take action.
Instagram already removes content that goes against their Community Guidelines, especially if the posts have been reported. But there are still those that are marked as “potentially harmful” due to bullying, hate speech, or encouraging violence. They will be “taking stronger action” against these borderline posts by lowering their appearance in Feeds and Stories. These “upsetting posts” will also be less visible in your feed depending on your history of reporting similar content.
To further review these potentially harmful content, they will be looking at captions if it’s similar to some posts that have been proven to breaking the rules on the platform. As for what you see on your feed, Instagram reminds users that content is ranked based on algorithmic things like how likely you are to interact with the post (liking, commenting, saving) and now they will also make content that you are most likely to report based on your history.
The changes will affect individual posts and not the accounts themselves. This is because you might be following accounts that will occasionally post things that will fall under the borderline harmful content so if you don’t want to see them on your feed, you may probably want to unfollow them totally. But at least now with these changes, the chances of you seeing them will be lower, if you’ve previously reported similar posts.
This latest change is somewhat similar to what Instagram did back in 2020 when they down-ranked accounts that shared misinformation. Let’s see if these updates will have an obvious effect on our feeds and how the general public will react to it.
