Earlier this week, Instagram announced a few changes to its moderation policy. The most significant one is that the app will now warn you before disabling your account.
Instagram’s previous “Account Disable Policy” received a lot of flak for disabling accounts without a warning. Users would launch their Instagram app only to find out that their account had been disabled without any prior notice.
With this new change, Instagram users will now receive a pop-up notification, letting them know that their account is at risk of being disabled. The notification will also allow you to appeal for deleted content and disabled accounts without having to go through the Help Center.
This appeal process will be available for moderation decisions around “content deleted for violations of our nudity and pornography, bullying and harassment, hate speech, drug sales, and counter-terrorism policies.” Instagram says that they will expand the appeal capabilities to more categories in the future.
The social network is now also changing the way it bans accounts. Previously it would ban your account if it accumulated a certain number of violations. The new policy is still keeping the old percentage rule, but it will now only ban an account if it has a certain amount of violations “within a window of time”.
This means that if there are multiple violations in a short span of time, you are likely to be banned.
The company, during the announcement, said this change will allow them to enforce their policies more consistently and hold users accountable for what they post on Instagram.
Going forward, we can expect more changes like this to come considering how much the company is focused on keeping its platform “a safe and supportive place”.
