Instagram Is Using AI To Detect Bullying In Photos And Captions

Instagram is taking action against trolls and bullies.

The social media giant has rolled out new machine learning tools that are able to ‘proactively detect’ bullying in photos and captions.

“While the majority of photos shared on Instagram are positive and bring people joy, occasionally a photo is shared that is unkind or unwelcome,” Instagram’s new lead Adam Mosseri wrote in a blog post. “We are now using machine learning technology to proactively detect bullying in photos and their captions and send them to our Community Operations team to review.”

One of Instagram’s new tools is bullying detection in captions and photos. Any unkind posts that are detected through the new machine learning technology will be sent to Instagram’s Community Operations team for human review.

Users will also be empowered to select the comments that appear during their live videos, meaning they can hide and filter out any bullying messages—This feature works in the same vein to the anti-bullying comment filter that was rolled out earlier this year for Feed, Explore and Profile. Users can control who can comment on their photos, videos and live clips via the Comments Controls section, located in the app settings.

While Instagram sees the act of curbing bullying incidents an important step, it also wants to take things further by introducing a new camera effect to spread kindness on the platform. When you select the effect in selfie mode, hearts will fill the screen, and you’ll be encouraged to tag a friend. It’s kinda cheesy, but hey, it’s Instagram, right? Your tagged friend will be notified as per usual, and they can then share this post to their own story, or “spread kindness” with a selfie of their own. If you switch it on over to the rear camera, you can add a filter featuring the hashtag #kindcomments, and examples of these in multiple languages.

These features has already started rolling out to all Android and iOS users globally.