Photo: Souvik Banerjee
By: Nick Gambino
Sliding into a user’s DMs isn’t always cute and flirtatious, sometimes it’s downright obscene. There’s a breed of guy out there obsessed with sending unsolicited nude pictures to women. They’re nothing more than internet flashers and something’s got to be done about them.
Instagram is testing a new tool that should help with the problem. While it won’t enter the mind of the sender and kick some sense into them before they fire off an ill-advised photo, it will cover up photos where nudity is detected.
This was first noticed by Alessandro Paluzzi, an app researcher, who screen grabbed the feature and tweeted it out. It was then confirmed by Meta to The Verge. When a photo arrives in one’s DMs with an Instagram cover over it to shield you from some BS, you’ll have the choice as to whether or not you see it.
If you’d rather not take a peek, you can just delete it and save your eyeballs the potential trauma. This feature can be turned off if you would rather receive these kinds of photos uncensored. The choice is yours, but they’re at least providing a way to cover it up if you’d like.
Meta is saying that the Nudity Protection tool is a lot like the Hidden Words feature where filthy or offensive DMs are filtered out based on text. Now they’re simply applying the same concept to pictures. Sensitive Content Control was also introduced a few months back to filter out nudity and violence from your feed.
This optional tool to combat nudity addresses the problem with the same kind of content entering into users’ DMs which can be even more of a violation. Now, just because Instagram can detect the presence of nudity doesn’t mean they are able to see the nudity themselves or even your private messages for that matter.
“We’re working closely with experts to ensure those new features preserve people’s privacy, while giving them control over the messages they receive,” Liz Fernandez, a spokesperson for Meta told The Verge.
We don’t know much else about the Nudity Protection tool, but Meta intends to divulge more information about it in the coming weeks.
