According to the latest news, Instagram is giving its users a little more power to let them see what they want in its content discovery center instead of seeing what they don’t want. The company launched a new feature called Sensitive Content Control on Tuesday, allowing anyone to filter posts that it believes may be offensive, hiding them from the Explore tab.
This new feature appears in the settings menu, giving users the option to allow more content that may be disturbing or offensive, restrict them, or be more restricted. This wording is a bit strange, but it acknowledges that the company’s audit work is not perfect, and this is at least realistic.
Instagram explained in the announcement: You can treat sensitive content as posts that don’t necessarily violate our rules, but they may make some people feel uneasy – for example, posts that may be sexually suggestive or violent.
TechCrunch asked the company to specify in detail what types of posts were filtered under each category, and whether humans or algorithms were used to determine which were sensitive content, but no response was received.
TechCrunch also asked if the company has plans to create separate switches for violence and sexual content. Considering that many people are satisfied with the latter, they may be reluctant to see violence appearing in the app’s makeup tutorials and influencers’ activities.
On Instagram, sensitive content is a huge umbrella category that allows but does not want to be regarded as directly promoted content. In its own recommended content guide, Instagram pointed out that sexually suggestive content such as pictures of people wearing transparent clothes does not meet the requirements for exploring tags. Instagram’s definition of sensitive content also includes dangerous forms of content, such as exaggerated health claims and posts promoting weight loss health products.
Last year, a campaign by black plus-size model Nyome Nicholas-Williams successfully forced the platform to relax its excessively restrictive nude rules. Instagram takes the new content control as part of a new effort to give users more power to determine the content displayed in their feed. The company wrote in a blog post: “We believe that people should be able to shape Instagram into the experience they want. The company pointed out that recent changes, such as the ability to disable comments, also give users more choices.
Although the company has given users more control over its algorithms in some small areas, it is also considering reducing the control over its users. Last month, Instagram began testing to incorporate algorithmic suggestions into the main page. This design choice will allow the company to inject more content on the platform that it wants users to see.
