Instagram Is Testing A Comment Blocking Tool For Celebrities

Taylor Swift had a bit of a “falling out” with Kanye West recently, and following the debacle, the popstar was inundated with thousands of personal attacks from an army of trolls. Following recent moves by Twitter to block some of the biggest influential trolls out there, Instagram is giving some celebrity users a tool to block certain comments.

It all began when Taylor Swift  and Kanye West had a very public disagreement over his recent video for “Famous”. Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock somewhere for the past two weeks or so will know exactly what I’m talking about. Well, the result was that Swift started receiving huge amounts of abuse from trolls – fans of Kanye or otherwise. So, Instagram gave her and other celebs a new tool that allows then to automatically block certain comments.

“Why not just delete the offending comments?” you might ask. Well, with over 86 million Instagram followers, the torrent of abuse levelled at Swift was massive and completely unmanageable. She was bombarded with a green snake emoji and the word “snake” on every other comment. As you can understand, die-hard fans of one celebrity often organise attacks on rival celebs…

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We haven’t heard much about the new tool but know that it is currently being tested with a select group of celebs and VIPs who face this problem. We also know that it resembles moderation settings on Facebook Pages – comments with specific words are blocked. It’s possible that the feature uses machine learning to automatically block comments that feature similarities to ones that have been manually blocked.

We also know that Instagram is committed to solving the trolling issue, and although it is a major problem for celebrities, everyone on Instagram could benefit from the new tool as well. A spokesman from the company added,

[quote]We’re always looking for ways to help people have a positive experience with comments on Instagram. We’re currently focused on providing tools to improve accounts with the most high-volume comment threads. We will use our learnings to continue to improve the comment experience on Instagram.[/quote]

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