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Instagram will now filter out bullying comments

Instagram will now filter out bullying comments

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Instagram is upgrading its offensive comment filter today, expanding it to automatically filter out bullying comments “containing attacks on a person’s appearance or character, as well as threats to a person’s well-being or health.”

The comment filter was originally introduced last year, with a focus on toxic and divisive comments, but the update today broadens what gets hidden to include the aforementioned types of comments. Users will also be able to disable the filter if they’d like to see the unedited comments on their feeds as well, but it will be enabled by default.

For now, the new anti-bullying filter is only launching for  English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, German, Russian, French, Japanese, and Mandarin comments, and Instagram plans to offer it in other languages in the future, too.

Correction: The new anti-bullying feature will be offering for multiple languages at launch, not only English as this port originally stated.