Over the past decade and a half, social media has become one of the most important communication tools in the world. However, as the industry grew, many problems came on to the surface and one of the biggest ones was online bullying. Many social media companies have since implemented policies to tackle the issue and the latest social media platform to do so is the Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform Instagram. In a new development, it has emerged that the company is now going to use Artificial Intelligence in order to tackle the problem of bullying.
The AI-powered tool that is going to be used by Instagram is known as DeepText, which belongs to Facebook and is going to be borrowed by the photo-sharing platform for its new initiative. Although DeepText had initially been developed three years ago to identify spam, however, since then the tool has been trained to identify words which are generally associated with bullying behavior. It is also interesting to note that instead of blocking out such comments, the AI-tool is going to be deployed in a different way altogether.
When words associated with bullying behavior are typed into the comment box, the user posting the comment will see a pop up stating, “Are you sure you want to post this? Learn more.” Upon using the ‘Learn More’ link, the user will be informed about the company’s initiative about making users ‘rethink’ about comments that contain words that could cause distress.
That being said, it is telling that users could ignore all that and still post the comments. However, it has been reported that according to testing by Instagram, users have often refrained from posting such comments after they got that sort of a prompt. Tackling bullying is an important initiative for social media platforms for the well being of their businesses as well. If such behavior continues and the company does nothing, then there is every chance that most users will eventually shut down their accounts. It is an important step from Instagram and one that is also in the best interests of the company.
