Instagram introduces feature to control sensitive content in ‘Explore’ tab: Everything to know

Financial Express checked and found that the feature is available in India

Instagram: Photo-sharing platform Instagram will now let users decide how much sensitive content they wish to see under the ‘Explore’ tab of the app. The announcement was made by Instagram’s parent app Facebook on Tuesday. The Explore tab shows posts, videos, Reels, etc to users based on the content they have previously liked and their interests that the algorithm has picked up, also allowing them to pick the content they see from categories like food, art, travel, etc. However, now, the app is getting a new feature that Facebook is calling the Sensitive Content Control.

The feature aims to let users have the control over the type of sensitive content that they see, giving them the power to adjust whether they want to see more or less of a particular type of sensitive content which does not really break the rules of Instagram, but could be an issue for some people, like posts that are suggestively violent or sexual.

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In a post, Facebook said that the feature was being introduced because it realised that the preferences of all people differed.

Financial Express checked and found that the feature is available in India, and it can be accessed in Settings, under the Account tab. In this tab, users would find the ‘Sensitive Content Control’ option, upon clicking which, they would find three options. The default is ‘Limit’, which is a medium restriction, and this can be liberalised by choosing the ‘Allow’ option or made stringent by selecting the ‘Limit Even More’ option.

The feature has come after a lot of efforts have been made by the Facebook-owned platform to regulate and police the problematic or harmful content on the platform and has previously introduced features like turning off comments or restricting comments for users who regularly face abusive or harmful comments.

Apart from that, the app has also given users the option to mute stories or posts of users they follow in case they find their content offensive or provocative, and it also does not move messages from people a user does not follow to their primary folder in the direct messages, instead keeping it in requests, so that the user does not see it if they don’t wish to, and even if they do see it, they do not need to reply since the other user would not know if their message has been seen or not.