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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