Instagram isn’t just about pretty pictures, it now also harbors bullying, misinformation and controversial self-expression content. To deal with that, Instagram today is announcing a bevvy of safety updates to protect users and give them more of a voice. Most significantly, Instagram will now let users appeal the company’s decision to take down one of their posts.
A new in-app interface over the next few months will let users “get a second opinion on the post,” says Instagram’s head of policy, Karina Newton. A different Facebook moderator will review the post. They’ll inform users of their conclusion either way.
Instagram always let users appeal account suspensions. Now someone can appeal a take-down, if the post was mistakenly removed for nudity. And when they weren’t nude or hate speech that was actually friendly teasing.
- Blocking Misinfo Hashtag Pages
On the misinformation front, Instagram will begin blocking vaccine-related hashtag pages when content surfaced on a hashtag page features a large proportion of verifiably false content about vaccines.
If there is some violating content, but under that threshold, Instagram will lock a hashtag into a “Top-only” post, where Recent posts won’t show up, to decrease visibility of problematic content.
- Suspensions Based On Tally
One other new change announced this week is that Instagram will no longer determine whether to suspend an account based on the percentage of their content that violates policies, but by a tally of total violations within a certain period of time.
Newton says, “It would disproportionately benefit those that have a large amount of posts,” because even a large number of violations would be a smaller percentage than a rare violation by someone who doesn’t post often.
Instagram said, accounts will be removed after an undisclosed amount of violations and an undisclosed window of time.
To prevent bad actors from gaming the system, Instagram won’t disclose the exact time frame or number of violations that trigger suspensions.
