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Instagram set to build anti-harassment tools

Popular social media application Instagram is preparing to let people with “high volume content threads” filter their comment streams, or just turn them off entirely, The Washington Post reports.

For those who decide to leave on the comments, they can create a banned words list that will enable them to hide the comments that use those terms. Soon, Instagram will enable everyday people on Instagram—the ones with not as much action on their accounts—to moderate their comments.

This comes less than a month after Instagram released a comment moderation option for business pages, which similarly lets accounts block comments with certain offensive words and phrases.

While harassment on Instagram hasn’t been as much of a story as harassment on other social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, the development of these tools is still a big deal for several users.

The website The Verge has reported that Instagram has already begun testing these features with celebrities—this is very likely what Taylor Swift used to stop all those snake emoji comments. Advertisers may also have been asking for this to prevent critical commenters.

“High-volume” Instagram accounts will receive the anti-harassment features first, according to the Post. The filtering feature is supposed to appear in “the coming weeks,” while Instagram is still determining whether to widely roll out the ability to disable comments.

As of June this year, Instagram had reached 500 million monthly active users, up from 400 million in September 2015.

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