Instagram has taken recent cues from the website known as Tumblr when it comes to promoting a healthy, positive social media community. Tumbler recently banished all content that promoted any type of self-harm. Instagram is looking to remove anything that encourages, cutting, eating disorders, suicide or any other harmful actions. Promote is the key term in their statement since theirs is a website that allows people to share photographs of their lives with other. The new addition will let users know they will have an account that becomes disabled if they find content of this sort on their site. According to a recent article, the community guidelines for Instagram will not allow for glorification or promotion of any types of self-harm content. They are asking their users to be community police when checking content and to flag any photographs with Terms of Service violations. That is just the beginning, as Instagram also plans to make it trickier for their users to actively share this type of content by using “hash tags” to ban related things such as “thinspiration”, and pro-anorexia or pro-bulimia content. Instagram will be re-directing users to a support website if they do get caught showing images of self harm or suicide. Any content that is related to eating disorders will be marked with a disclaimer linking it to a national eating disorders website. A warning will also inform their users that content might show graphic content and then one of two separate promoted URLs will show up under the text. Instagram’s recent blog post tell users that any notices of the sort will provide users with hash tag pages that give resources to help them seek needed help and they will be able to choose whether to view or back out of the questionable content. Tumblr enacted their policy last February and Instagram is following suit to let users know they will NOT support any sort of promotion of eating disorders or self-mutilation on their site.
