Instagram Will Now Police Your Direct Messages for Hate, and They've Already Involved the Cops

Alex Parker reporting for RedState

When I was growing up, hate was an emotion.

And “hate speech” would’ve denoted someone speaking words which included the word “hate.”

These days, there’s a whole new meaning.

And it appears there’s an entire generation that believes it’s against the law:

For all those who think the Constitution bars speech flavored with a spice tasting hateful to them, Instagram is going to bat for the American way.

As relayed by The Daily Wire, last week, the social media site announced it’l start policing not only posts, but private messages sent between users.

From the Wire:

Citing “targeted footballers in the UK,” the platform announced Wednesday that they will be taking “more steps” “to help prevent” abuse and hate speech in direct messages.

Here’s Instagram’s explanation:

So today we’re announcing some new measures, including removing the accounts of people who send abusive messages, and developing new controls to help reduce the abuse people see in their DMs.

IG already allows users to block one another. But the platform’s upping its protection game:

We strengthened these rules last year, banning more implicit forms of hate speech, like content depicting Blackface and common antisemitic tropes. … Between July and September of last year, we took action on 6.5 million pieces of hate speech on Instagram, including in DMs, 95% of which we found before anyone reported it.

The new rules:

Today, we’re announcing that we’ll take tougher action when we become aware of people breaking our rules in DMs. Currently, when someone sends DMs that break our rules, we prohibit that person from sending any more messages for a set period of time. Now, if someone continues to send violating messages, we’ll disable their account. We’ll also disable new accounts created to get around our messaging restrictions, and will continue to disable accounts we find that are created purely to send abusive messages.

But wait — there’s more.

In the UK, Instagram is teaming up with law enforcement:

We’re also committed to cooperation with UK law enforcement authorities on hate speech and will respond to valid legal requests for information in these cases. As we do with all requests from law enforcement, we’ll push back if they’re too broad, inconsistent with human rights, or not legally valid.

If you weren’t aware, the ‘Gram’s owned by none other than Facebook.

And in January — following a de-Trumping of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Google, and others — head honcho Adam Mosseri threw off any pretense of neutrality:

“We’re not neutral. No platform is neutral, we all have values and those values influence the decisions we make. We try and be apolitical. but that’s increasingly difficult, particularly in the US where people are more and more polarized.”

To quote the great John Lennon, “It’s easy if you try.”

But maybe not in Silicon Valley.

Speaking of Twitter, in March, the Bluebird laid down the law on what could and could not be finger-tapped.

From my coverage of the Hateful Conduct Policy:

Surely that cultural evolution is informing the rules applied by social media organizations, including Twitter’s newest “hateful conduct” restrictions.
Turns out, written rudeness by goofballs must be outlawed.

Down with crayoned crappiness.

Therefore, as of Thursday, turdy typists will be disciplined for using any language that “dehumanizes on the basis of age, disability or disease.”

…

If reported, Tweets that break this rule pertaining to age, disease and/or disability, sent before today will need to be deleted, but will not directly result in any account suspensions because they were Tweeted before the rule was in place.

As our nation increasingly uses social media to communicate, Big Tech monitoring what’s written becomes akin to South Central Bell refereeing what people in the 70’s said over telephones.

Some may figure folks should be allowed to work out their problems with one another on their own.

But the best I can tell, those people don’t run social media sites.