How to combat bullying and harassment on Instagram
We're committed to protecting and supporting you on Instagram. We have developed features and tools to help keep you safe, so that you can focus on creating and sharing your content with a safe and supportive community.
Protect against unwanted messages
Hidden Words and Advanced Comment Filtering not only protect against unwanted comments but also unwanted direct messages. These options are on by default and help prevent comments that may contain profanity, bullying or spam but you also have access to a custom word list which we highly recommend!
- This allows you to prevent custom words, emojis or phrases from appearing in your comments or inbox.
- You can also search for custom word lists that already exist (example: if you're particularly worried about a certain topic or subject, you can find relevant lists that already exist).
- Filter out even more comments that may be spam with Advanced Comment filtering, or may contain offensive words or phrases. Comments from people you follow and who follow you will not be hidden. This setting is on by default, but you can change it at any time.
Limited your interactions
If you’re experiencing unwanted engagement you can use Limited Interactions to manage interactions with people in bulk. This is an account level tool that temporarily limits your comments and direct messages from specific accounts.
- You can choose to limit interactions from people who aren't following you, or people who recently followed you within the last week. These accounts will not be able to direct message you or comment on any of your content. You can also set a time limit for Limited Interactions, which you can change at any time.
- Keep in mind that Limited Interactions do not impact your reach in Feed or the Explore tab.
Reachability settings
From your Instagram settings, you can find multiple options to customize your experience and how people are able to interact with your account.
- You can leave your direct messages open where anyone can message you–even if they follow you or not. You can also opt to only allow people you follow to direct message you, and all other messages appear in a separate inbox. You can also disable direct messages altogether.
- There are also settings to control who can tag or who can @mention you, and who can comment on your posts.
- You can also turn off comments on a post, which you can do from the post itself.
Reporting, blocking, and restricting
We encourage you to report accounts, posts, and comments that you feel go against our Community Guidelines, whether it’s bullying, harassment, hate speech, or doxxing.
- Reporting the content you want our teams to review helps us properly take action against potentially harmful content. When reporting direct messages, for example, you should report the chat and not the account because the team that reviews the profile doesn’t have access to direct messages. This is because we take privacy seriously and only specific support teams can access direct messages.
- After you report, we encourage you to block the account. When you block someone, it now gives you the option to include any new and existing accounts someone may have.
- You can also use our other moderation tools like restricting accounts or hiding or deleting individual comments.
Reducing spam
We know that spending time deleting spam comments from your posts or removing fake accounts from your followers isn’t how you want to spend your time. To help with this, our teams built tools to give you more power to stop spam and bot accounts from interacting with you and your community:
- Bulk Unfollow: We made it easier for you to review existing followers by placing suspected bots or other suspicious users into a folder for your review. You can then choose to remove and block them at once. Select your followers list to find this folder.
- Hold Followers for Review: We also want to prevent new unwanted followers from following you. Going forward, we’ll hold new requests from suspicious users in a folder for your review as well. You’ll be notified to review and can choose to add, deny, or block all in one place. You can choose to opt out at any time from your settings.
- Spam Comment Filtering: Our existing Advanced Comment Filtering in Hidden Words now works at filtering out spam comments too.
- Hold Tags for Review: We know it’s frustrating to get spam tags on content from other accounts. To combat this, we also filter suspected spam tags into a folder for your review. You can choose to approve them if you’d like, or you can hide and remove them.
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