Providing a social media platform free of bullying is not an easy mission, and all social media apps know that perfectly, so they spend several efforts to fight abuse on their platforms. It is clear that Instagram is considered to be one of those social apps, which have made decent efforts regarding the matter.

Accordingly, last week, Instagram announced on its official blog its latest tools to help combat bullying, including a new way to identify and report bullying in photos, in addition to rolling out a camera effect to help spread kindness in Stories. As explained by Instagram:

“There is no place for bullying on Instagram. If people see that kind of hurtful behavior on our platform, they can report it, and we remove any content that violates our guidelines. But online bullying is complex, and we know we have more work to do to further limit bullying and spread kindness on Instagram.”

Detecting Bullying in Photos

Detecting Bullying in Photos is one of Instagram latest features, which based on using machine learning technology to proactively detect bullying in photos and their captions and send them to the Instagram Community Operations team to review. Accordingly, Instagram will able to identify and remove significantly more bullying and protecting youngest community members since teens experience higher rates of bullying online than others.

Instagram confirmed that this new technology has begun to roll out and will continue to in the coming weeks.

Bullying Comment Filter on Live Videos

The second announced update in this way is Bullying Comment Filter on Live Videos. A few months ago, Instagram launched a bullying comment filter, in order to detect and hide bullying comments from Feed, Explore and Profile. Now, Instagram adds additional filters to comments on live videos, hoping to provide a safe environment on its platform to allow Instagrammers to authentically connect with their friends and share their interests.

Kindness Camera Effect

On the other hand, Instagram announced the launch of Kindness Camera Effect, as its latest update. To achieve this, Instagram partnered with New York Times best-selling teen author, dancer and actor, Maddie Ziegler, to launch a kindness camera effect to spread positivity across its platform between Instagrammers worldwide.

How to Access Kindness Camera Effect?!

1. If the user follows Maddie, they will have the camera effect automatically.
2. They need to Swipe to open the camera, then tapping the face icon at the bottom and choose the new camera effect.
3. In selfie mode, hearts will fill the screen.
4. Additionally, a user will be encouraged to tag a friend he wants to support.
5. Friends will receive a notification that a user mentioned them in their story.
6. They can share it to their own story or use the camera effect to spread kindness to someone else.
7. If the user switches to the rear camera, they will see an overlay of kind comments in many languages.
8. If the user isn’t a follower of Maddie but they see someone else with the effect, they should tap “try it” to add it to their camera.

Finally, in the same announcement, Instagram confirmed that there’s more work to do, “and we will continue to do our part to protect the community so that you can safely be yourself on Instagram.”