While Instagram may not be as known for its troll problem as Facebook, the YouTube comments section and especially Twitter, it's still a major issue for the service.
However, that could be about to change as the social media giant is introducing new tools to hopefully filter out trolls and spam.
In a blog post, Instagram's CEO Kevin Systrom explained that the filter is automatically enabled but you can turn it off and on at will, as well as manually delete or report comments that slip through.
The offensive comment filter is only currently available in English, but will expand to other languages over time. Meanwhile, the spam filter is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French, German, Russian, Japanese and Chinese.
Wired has a bit more context on how the system works and was built. In short, the software finds potentially offensive words and then looks at other words in the sentence to try and process if they are being used in an abusive way.
Instagram compared how the AI processed comments with how a team of humans dealt with them, to see if they were achieving the same results – and the tests were done again and again until Instagram was happy enough to release it.
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Twitter last year expanded its mute function in order to cut down on troll comments, saying at the time: "We don't expect these announcements to suddenly remove abusive conduct from Twitter. No single action by us would do that."
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