How To Filter Out Offensive Comments On Instagram?
What is Instagram?
Instagram is a social media application that allows you to connect with your friends by means of stories, and posts. You can comment on different stories and posts if the account owner allows it, and bond over shared memories or common hobbies. Instagram is a household word for all youths. As a result, it is being used to market products and services to increase their visibility and presence. Many people use Instagram for their personal reasons like simply using it to interact with friends and family.
Others want it for business purposes, to market their products and services. In some cases, disabling the comments section can be harmful to the product or to the brand, as people will not be able to write positive reviews or ask genuine questions about your product or service. A reduced level of interaction will lead to reduced interest in the product. This is why you need to have the ability to remove certain comments you feel border on harassment or negativity as opposed to critical product reviews. Instagram has come out with many ways for you to be able to do so.
Offensive comments are more visible and happen on profiles that are public, which means anyone can follow you and view your feed, irrespective of whether they know you or not.
What are spam or offensive comments?
If your account is public, has a lot of followers, and a great amount of interaction, people might use your comments section for marketing their goods and services. They might post comments saying ‘dm for more followers’ or ‘movie extras.’ If the comment is not adding any value or any major interaction to your post, then it means that the comment is unworthy of being there in the first place. These are the typical spam comments. They do not essentially harm you or your reputation, but they do harm your following on Instagram, which will be explained below.
Offensive comments are those that target you or your products and services, or simply use foul language in your comments section for the sake of it. These just promote bad faith on Instagram and are considered to be displeasing to the eye, by both you and your followers. Sadly, since only you have control over the comments section in your account, you are the one saddled with the responsibility of removing unwanted comments.
Why should you bother deleting spam or offensive comments on your posts?
The more popular you are on Instagram, the more probability of offensive or spam comments being made on your posts. The large number of comments might also make it difficult for you to identify and remove spam or comments. However, removing them is an imperative action, because if you let such comments exist on your post, it creates the impression that you do not care or view the comments or reply to the people who post genuine queries. This can reduce your reach on Instagram.
Why not use Report Comment option?
While reporting a comment renders the comment removed from the post, the comment will still show up in your ‘Recent Activity’ tab. In cases of grave disrespect, the account may end up disabled or removed, but the person harrassing you can simply create another account and continue what he was doing without any hassle.
If you filter the comments instead, no matter what account or what comment, if Instagram recognises it to contain one of the keywords you do not want displayed on your post, it will remove it. The best part is, the person whose comment you removed will be unable to see that the comment is removed, and no one else will be able to view the offensive comment.
Filtering out Offensive Comments On Posts
If you are using your smartphone –
- Navigate to your profile
- Click on the hamburger menu icon
- In Settings, find the Privacy section.
- Navigate to Comments
- You will see the option – Hide Offensive Comments
- Click on it to turn it on.
If you have fallen prey to offensive comments before, you and they both will be aware of this option and might word their comments differently, so while the essence is spewing hate, the comment will not be recognised as ‘offensive.’ For such scenarios, you have an option to use certain key words which you would like to avoid in your comments section. The keywords are a filter that will be used by Instagram to determine which comments you will be comfortable with, and which need to be removed, regardless of offensive or not.
- Navigate to your profile
- Click on the hamburger menu icon
- Go to Settings
- Go to Privacy and find Comments.
- Look for the Manual Filter option.
- Customise it by entering the words, phrases, and emojis that you do not want to see in the comments section of your post.
If you are using your computer browser –
- Go to Instagram.
- Click on your profile.
- Go to Settings.
- You will find the Privacy and Security option.
- Go to Edit Comment Settings
- You can either use Default keywords, or Custom keywords.
Default keywords are those that Instagram picks up as common keywords to grade a comment as ‘offensive,’ but as discussed above, these might not be as effective when it comes to combatting foul language in your comments section. The Custom keywords setting helps you to decide what keywords need to be looked for when identifying a certain comment as ‘offensive’ or otherwise.
Conclusion
Technology has its pros and cons. While freedom of speech is important, using it simply for the purpose of belittling others cannot be deemed a correct activity. All these platforms were essentially made to encourage positive interaction between human beings, and hence any sort of negativity in the form of hate comments or unauthorised promotion of your product basking in someone else’s popularity needs to be ‘filtered out.’ Instagram recognises that anonymity in the internet may not always allow for the culprit to be caught, and therefore allows this feature.