Facebook continues its fight against online harassment, and since Wednesday allows Instagram users to filter messages received on the platform to redact offensive expressions.
“Since direct messages are private conversations, we don't proactively check them for signs of hate speech or harassment like we do elsewhere on Instagram,” says the image sharing app in a communicated.
Users in seven countries (UK, France, Ireland, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Canada) can activate an option to automatically hide “direct message requests” containing offensive words, phrases or emojis.
"It is in these countries that there have been public figures, especially footballers, who have been victims of abuse and offensive terms in direct messages," said Clotilde Briend, public policy manager at Instagram.
The bulk of hate speech emanates from these direct message requests.
We will give each of us the opportunity to report these messages to us or not.
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Coming soon to WhatsApp and Messenger?
In French, a few dozen expressions are blocked, defined with the Génération Numérique association, which educates the youngest in the use of social networks, and users will have the possibility of adding their own terms, as is already the case. for moderation of comments. The filtering is carried out directly on the user's terminal, and it could then be extended to other popular messaging services of the Facebook group, namely Messenger and Whatsapp.
Instagram, with more than a billion users, has been trying for years to fight against the harassment, hate speech and disinformation that abounds on social networks.
In 2019, the company was releasing artificial intelligence to proactively warn people who might post offensive messages, and more recently it announced it would use machine learning to guess the actual age of users.
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