Social media platforms bring us closer and bridge geographical differences, but sometimes they can be pretty dark places. Cyber-bullying is an important and alarming phenomenon that is on the rise as social platforms become more and more popular among teens.
For us, millennials Facebook might have been the go-to platform, but today’s generation Z have switched to Instagram. According to recent studies about 70% of US teens are using the platform daily. There are several cyber-bullying practices that have spread on the platform. In order to combat the cruel practices about a year ago Instagram introduced a filtering mechanism for offensive comments. Nowadays not only comments but among others, finstas aka fake instagrams have been used to post embarrassing or harassing pictures of others. On the 9th of October, the new head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri announced that they are expanding Instagram’s filtering tool to photos, captions and comments on live videos. The AI enhanced tool filters out offensive or potentially bullying images and texts and sends it to Instagram’s moderators, who then investigate the cases.
Of course, the practice works on creating a safer online environment, but a potential risk lies in false positives. What do these mean for our generation’s meme factories or harmless banter among friends? In order to account for these errors, the personal relationship between the account owners is also factored in the algorithm, as well as previous interactions. This could lead to another potential backlash on the practice: privacy concern?
Instagram has started to roll out the new tool in honour of National Bullying Prevention Month in the US and the Anti-Bullying Week in the UK, during the month of October. Although it is definitely no silver bullet, hopefully Instagram’s efforts to fight cyber-bullying will result in social media being a bit safer and kinder place and it will not restrain free content creation and raise privacy concerns among users.
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Foster, A. (2018). The disturbing new cyber-bullying trend. [online] NewsComAu. Available at: https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/the-disturbing-new-cyberbullying-trend-gaining-popularity-with-students/news-story/b03a9e27ef8ef00d4d9195867fc2adfd [Accessed 15 Oct. 2018].
Lorenz, T. (2018). Teens Are Being Bullied ‘Constantly’ on Instagram. [online] The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/teens-face-relentless-bullying-instagram/572164/ [Accessed 15 Oct. 2018].
Mosseri, A. (2018). New Tools to Limit Bullying and Spread Kindness on Instagram. [online] Instagram. Available at: https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/10/09/new-tools-to-limit-bullying-and-spread-kindness-on-instagram/ [Accessed 15 Oct. 2018].
Thompson, N. (2018). Instagram Launches An AI System to Blast Away Nasty Comments. [online] WIRED. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/instagram-launches-ai-system-to-blast-nasty-comments/ [Accessed 15 Oct. 2018].
Vincent, J. (2018). Instagram is using AI to detect bullying in photos and captions. [online] The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/9/17954658/instagram-ai-machine-learning-detect-filter-bullying-comments-captions-photos [Accessed 15 Oct. 2018].
Thank you for this interesting post Orsolya, I really liked it! I think this is an amazing initiative. Unfortunately, social media are not safe environments especially for very young users, who might be more easily influenced. As you also said, although it is not a silver bullet, hopefully it will be a nice improvement for all Instagram’s users. Nevertheless, I am sure that in the beginning probably some harmless posts will be taken down due to some bugs in the system. However, with time less and less of these episodes will occur and the technology will be more accurate. I really hope this initiave brings some reason in people’s mind!
Super interesting! Although I’m doubting that this feature Instagram is implementing will make the bullying less. I think people who want to bully via social media will always find a way. Also maybe implicitly just by commonly deciding to not like any picture of a particular person anymore (which would damage the person’s self image).
Orsolya, really nice topic! It’s great to see that big tech companies put effort into using AI for positive change within their business. I believe, that this technology can be very helpful in the future, especially if it is being used to improve life quality and our social values. As you also stated, Instagram’s approach might not be the solution for all bullying on their platform, but it is a first step. However, I am sure the technology still needs some training and improvement, in order to function the way it is supposed to. Overall, it is a very positive initiative of Instagram. Thank you for sharing!
Like Rocky once said, “It ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward”
Perhaps instead of suffering from cyber-bullying, one should just become more resistant to it? Just think for a second, how many bad things worse than bullying (on the internet especially) can happen to you. You can lose your family. You can lose parts of your body. You can become severely ill. You might lose just about everything in your life, yet it still can be worse. And you have to be prepared for that. Life is not cotton candy, its a fierce competition for limited resources, be it money, love, respect. And if you can be brought down just because somebody writes somebody on the internet, what kind of a person are you? Perhaps you should just sit down and look into yourself, and find out why things they say bother you so much. These insecurities they take advantage of, you should not ignore them, you should face them. If you put dust under the carpet, It wont go anywhere, it will still be in your room.
Its all about solving the problem rather than running away from it. You have to realise that most people dont really care about you, in a good way. and all the internet bullies are deeply unhappy people for who the only postitve thing in live is spilling shit-talk over other people – not even in real life, but in the internet. Because in real life you can get your bones broken for what you say.
To conclude – do not let yourself to be affected by what other people say. Especially if it is not constructive criticism.
Hi Orsolya,
Thanks for sharing with us. I want to stress that the tasks/responsibilities of platforms are not limited to providing functions, third party access and data security. As you mentioned, platforms are used on a daily basis by generation Z. As a result, the platforms become really important to those young generations. The platforms provide opportunities to meet new “good people” but it also an opportunity for the “bad people” to take advantage. Not only bullying is in my opinion a dangerous field within social media platforms. Parents and platform providers should also prevent their children (and themselves)to get in contact with kidnappers for example.
AI is not able to do this job yet, but lets hope it can significantly help parents and platform providers to ban those who are harming.