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Instagram to take tougher stance for hate speech via DMs

Instagram said that it has also started rolling more controls out to personal accounts in many countries, and we hope to make them available to everyone soon.

Instagram to take tougher stance for hate speech via DMs

(Photo: iStock)

Instagram announced today that it’ll start disabling the accounts of people who repeatedly send hateful messages.

Toughening its stance on hate speech in private direct messages (DMs), Instagram’s first-time offenders won’t be able to send messages for an undefined period of time, but if they send hateful messages again, their account will be disabled.

“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,” an Instagram blog post states.

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Instagram’s hate speech policy bans attacks on people based on protected characteristics, including race or religion, as well as “more implicit forms of hate speech,” like content depicting blackface and anti-Semitic tropes. Instagram says it also cooperates with law enforcement when necessary to assist in hate speech cases.

Instagram said that it has also started rolling more controls out to personal accounts in many countries, and we hope to make them available 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,” it informed.

The new updates were announced after the company saw racist online abuse targeted at footballers in the UK.

“We don’t want this behaviour on Instagram”.

Since DMs are for private conversations, Instagram does not use technology to proactively detect content like hate speech or bullying the same way it does in other places.

Between July and September of last year, the company took action on 6.5 million pieces of hate speech on Instagram, including in DMs.

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