cyberbullying

Meta rolls out new privacy updates in bid to keep teen users safe

New online safety precautions have been introduced by social media behemoth Meta to protect teenage users.

Last year, Meta introduced some of the steps that might be taken to keep teenagers away from possibly suspicious adults. For instance, the company forbids adults from contacting minors with whom they are not connected or from seeing adolescents in its People You May Know suggestions.

On Monday, Meta said that it would add new safeguards to its social networking sites Facebook and Instagram to safeguard young users from harm online. Facebook announced in a blog post that anybody below 16, or 18 in some regions, will now automatically have more private settings for their accounts.

The company is experimenting with additional safeguards to prevent teens from communicating with questionable adults they are not related to, and they won’t display them in the People You May Know section for teens.

The company is also completely eliminating the message button from teen Instagram profiles when they are visited by suspicious adults as an additional degree of security. According to Meta, an adult account that has lately been reported or blocked by a youngster qualifies as suspicious.

The updated tools come with more standard privacy settings and safety notifications. Some privacy options allow kids to control who may view their friends list, posts that they’re tagged in, and who can add comments on their public posts.

Meta noted, “We’re working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to build a global platform for teens who are worried intimate images they created might be shared on public online platforms without their consent.”

In order to combat the online proliferation of self-generated personal photographs, new tools and training are also being developed. Meta is collaborating with Thorn and their NoFiltr brand to develop instructional resources that will assist youngsters in lessening the shame and stigma associated with intimate photographs.

Meta noted, “We found that more than 75% of people that we reported to NCMEC for sharing child exploitative content shared the content out of outrage, poor humor, or disgust, and with no apparent intention of harm. Sharing this content violates our policies, regardless of intent.

We’re planning to launch a new PSA campaign that encourages people to stop and think before resharing those images online and to report them to us instead.”

Teens can use a variety of tools created by Meta to inform the platform when something in one of its apps causes them to feel uncomfortable. They are encouraged to use these tools through new notifications the company has introduced.

For instance, the company sends teens safety notifications with instructions on how to deal with abusive messages from adults and prompts them to report profiles to the platform when they block someone.

Over 100 million users viewed safety notifications on Messenger in a single month in 2021. Additionally, the company has made it simpler for users to access the reporting tools. As an outcome, the company received over 70% more reports from minors, in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2021, on Instagram DM, and Facebook Messenger.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Instagram Rolls Out its Restrict Feature to Fight Cyberbullies

Though the internet has brought so many positive changes to our daily life, there has been some of the hazardous effects of the same as well. Cyberbullying is one such bad situation that has been promoted on many on the social media platforms, and people are getting affected by this mentally. The owner of these social media platforms are well aware and have been thinking of new ways to put a restriction on the bullies.

Instagram, one of the top social media platforms, is no different and have been facing the same bullying stuff. The company has taken proper measures for stopping such activities on the platform. It has already set up a team of moderators as well to keep an eye on the daily comments. But still, with the everyday bullying, it has not been able to keep up with it and has been a part of major criticism. In July this year, the company took another step to handle cyberbullying and introduced the beta of a new feature, named Restrict, that would help the content creators to hide the hate comments on their posts.

Today, the company announced that the very feature will now be available to the general public, and people will be able to shadowban the users and their comments including the hate speech. Being shadowbanned means that the user making the hate comment will have no idea that his/her comment has been restricted, and no one else, other than them, can see the comment after it has been made hidden.

To restrict a hate comment, the user needs to swipe left on that very comment. If the person continues to post such comments on other posts as well the user can directly go to the person’s profile and restrict all their comments. The feature will also keep the bullies from seeing if the user who has restricted them is ever active. The feature is similar to the Mute feature from Twitter, thus, won’t block the user entirely. This way, the bullies can still send the users direct messages, but these messages will go to the message request folder of the recipient. With the feature, even if the user has read the message, the bullies cannot see if the user has seen the message or not.

“Bullying is a complex issue, and we know that young people face a disproportionate amount of online bullying but are reluctant to report or block peers who bully them,” Instagram said, “Restrict is designed to empower you to quietly protect your account while still keeping an eye on the bully.”

Instagram has been the favourites of not only the teens, but the celebrities also like to post their daily pictures and events on it, as it has got the most active audience. But there is no one who has not faced hate speech on their account and is unable to fight it completely. Instagram has already got the blocking the user feature on it. And now, with new restrict feature, there may be some hope the users for fighting against the bullies.

Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

www.xornor.co

Instagram Announces Two New Features to Fight Cyberbullying

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Yashica Vashishtha

Cyberbullying has become the biggest issue of the current time, as trolling in the comment section of various social media platforms has hurt many people mentally, especially the teens. To overcome this issue, Instagram has announced a new feature for the platform, through which the users will be able to flag the hate comments on their posts. Though Instagram already has set a proper guideline for the users to follow and has got a filtering feature that screens the hate comments, it is quite time-consuming.

Instagram cyberbullying — Image Source: npr.org

“We can do more to prevent bullying from happening on Instagram, and we can do more to empower the targets of bullying to stand up for themselves. Today we’re announcing one new feature in both areas. These tools are grounded in a deep understanding of how people bully each other and how they respond to bullying on Instagram, but they’re only two steps on a longer path.” said Instagram head Adam Mosseri through a post.

The company has made the use of artificial intelligence for implementing the new feature, such that whenever anyone will try to post a comment, if the system finds it offensive, a question will pop up on their screen asking, “Are you sure you want to post this?”, along with an undo button, to change their action.

Though people will still be able to post the comment, according to Mosseri, the feature will produce high possibilities for the commenter to rethink about posting the comment.

Another feature, that the company is working on, is the ability of a user to restrict the other users’ interaction with the former’s account. This feature will help Instagram users, who are reluctant to blocking or unfollowing an account that is constantly cyberbullying them. If one user has restricted a specific account, the comments posted by that account will only be visible to the commenter, unless the former approves it for the other users. This way, the account owner can shadowban the users, who use hate speech, without them knowing about it. The banned user will also be restricted from seeing if the owner of the account has read their DM or is active at the moment.

Yashica Vashishtha

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