New safety features have been released by Instagram continuing its commitment to support its users safety and wellbeing.

Blocking people has been made easy with this new feature allowing users to block someone who may have other accounts linked to them. Ultimately making it more difficult for that person to interact with the user again on Instagram.

Last year, the app tested to see if this new feature would work: its results indicated that users will be expected to block four million fewer accounts every week, as the automation feature should work seamlessly. 

Instagram has also updated its hidden words feature indicating since last year, more than one in five people with large followings on the platform have turned on the feature. This allowed users to automatically filter harmful content from their comments and message requests. 

Instagram revealed that when users turned on the feature, 40 percent fewer comments that might be offensive are not seen.

However, this feature is only benefiting users who have creator accounts at the moment as Instagram continues to carry out more testing. All users will be able to turn their settings on or off at any time and can create a list of words, phrases and emojis they want to hide.

The app is continuing to improve this feature and will introduce other features like;

• Expanding hidden words to cover story replies, so offensive replies from people you don’t follow will be sent to a hidden request folder allowing the user to not see them.
• Bringing in new languages, including Farsi, Turkish, Russian, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil.
• Instagram is filtering to spot and hide more intentional misspellings of offensive terms, for instance, if someone uses a “1” instead of an “i”.
• New terms have been introduced to filter message requests that might contain scams or spam. This is available in English, but have stated they will bring more languages and countries soon.

Remember MSN nudges? Instagram is bringing them back!

Instagram has stated they “understand there are cases where people mean well but may misjudge how their words could negatively impact others.”

The nudges feature will show up as a notification encouraging people to consider how they respond that may be offensive. 

The feature is also available in direct messages reminding people to be respectful when sending messages to a creator.