Instagram Taking Steps To Curb Online Bullying With AI

Instagram, platform acquired by the giant company Facebook, will launch a new tool to battle against bullying, the company revealed the development news on Monday.

Currently, Instagram is examining the anti-bullying feature developed with AI that will identify text related to bullying. Facebook is experiencing high scrutiny over the harassment issue faced by most users.

The new tool of Instagram uses Artificial Intelligence to inform users when they are about to post any bullying or offensive comments.

Instagram adopted the AI feature ‘DeepText’ from Facebook to carry bullying operation. Back in 2016, the essential job of this tool was to look out spam. While, from 2017 to now, the developer team has been instructing the AI tool to identify and ban offensive comments such as racial insult.

AI reads the comments on Instagram and if AI identifies that the user is bullying another user, the tool will display a warning as follows, “Are you sure you want to post this? Learn more.”

If the commenter clicks on Learn more option, then they will be diverted to a notice that mentions, “We are asking people to rethink comments that seem similar to others that have been reported.”

The commenter has an option to decide; he can either ignore the notice or move ahead with its posting. Instagram conducted a test result and mentioned that the warning motivates a few users to cancel the posting of painful comments.

Whenever an offensive word is identified by the Instagram in a comment section, a question pop-ups asking users to confirm the post along with an ‘Undo Button’ to cancel post.

As per the photo and video sharing app, users have used the new feature mostly to change offensive words with positive words at a limited trial version.

The new feature of Instagram allows users to think twice before posting bullying text.