Instagram Uses AI to Filter Spam and Abusive Comments (Jun 29, 2017)

Instagram is announcing today that it’s now using artificial intelligence to filter spam and abusive comments in the app. Wired has a feature (also linked below) which dives deeper into the background here and makes clear that what Instagram is doing here builds on Facebook’s DeepText AI technology, and that Instagram has been working on it for some time. The spam filter works in nine languages, while the comment moderation technology only works in English for now, but both should clean up the Instagram experience. Importantly, though both spam and harassment are issues on Instagram, neither are as bad there because so many people have private accounts – I haven’t seen an official statement from Instagram on this but some research and testing suggests it’s likely between 30 and 50% of the total number of accounts that are private. Those accounts, in turn, are far less likely to receive either spam or abusive comments, since they’ve explicitly chosen to allow those who might comment to follow them. However, for the rest, and especially for celebrities, brands, and so on, these are likely far bigger issues, so cleaning them up in a way that doesn’t require the same massive investment in manual human moderation as Facebook’s core product is a good thing all around.

via Instagram Blog (see also Wired feature)

The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.

• Facebook
• Instagram

• AI
• Censorship
• Harassment
• Machine learning

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