Instagram CEO Has New Way To Fight Racism And Sexual Harassment

Instagram will have tools to suppress hate speech and racism. (photo: unsplash)

JAKARTA - Instagram will soon launch a new feature. This was revealed by Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri in a 3-minute 16-second video uploaded on his IGTV official Instagram account.

Mosseri said Instagram would have tools to suppress hate speech and racism, including the new Limits feature. Recently, hate speech, including racism, has become a hotbed on social media, and it must be eradicated.

Quoted from Engadget, Friday 23 July, as a case in point, Mosseri referred to the recent Euro 2020 final. At that time three black players in the England National team faced a flood of abuse after England lost to Italy when the match went to penalty shootouts.

"Racism and hate speech have no place on Instagram. Honestly, it's not only upsetting to see people being treated this way, it's also ruining how Instagram works," said Mosseri.

“We get millions of reports every day. So if 1 percent of them are wrong, then there are tens of thousands of problematic things to say on Instagram. That's why it's so important we build tools to enable people to protect themselves."

Limits offers users the option to lock their accounts from hate speech, racism, harassment targets or unwanted comments. This feature is an integration of other control tools that Instagram already has, namely Block, Restricted, and Hidden Words.

However, Mosseri revealed that the feature is currently still in the development stage and is not yet widely available to all users. According to Mosseri, the idea behind Limits is that users are often inundated with scathing comments making it difficult to delete them all in a short amount of time.

"Whatever it is, we know that people are sometimes in temporary moments of risk and pain, and we wanted to give them the tools to protect themselves in those situations," Mosseri said.