Instagram is bringing the “Mute” feature to its users, a feature which has been available to twitter users for years. Like Twitter, users will now be able to mute users without necessarily unfollowing them. In addition to its block and report features in feed and comments, users will now have an additional tool to control what they see in the feed without having to unfollow or block users.
This feature was already available to Instagram Stories users but is now being extended to the feed where you can now exclude photos and videos you don’t want to see from certain accounts.
“When you mute an account, you can still see posts on their profile page and get notified about comments or posts you’re tagged in. The accounts you mute will not be aware that you’ve muted them. You can always unmute an account to get their posts back in your feed.”
That said, if you turned on notifications from muted accounts, you still get informed of their activities in the notification section or if you’re tagged by the muted account, it still applies with the only exception being that you don’t see stuff from them in the feed.
The advantage of the mute button of course is that someone won’t know when they have been muted but if you unfollow someone just because you don’ like their posts, they can see it and reciprocate the gesture. By muting them you can take a break from their posts pending whenever you choose to unmute them.
This is just the latest in a series of moves by social media companies to tackle trolling and cyber bullying. From Facebook to Twitter, measures have been take to tackle online abuse.
Instagram is working on “usage insights” that it says will help it understand how time spend on its platform impacts peoples’ lives. Instagram at least for the five months of this year so far has been more concerned with making the community safer for all users by giving individual accounts more control over what they see stuff and when they see it.
Paul Balo is the founder of TechBooky and a highly skilled wireless communications professional with a strong background in cloud computing, offering extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing wireless communication systems.
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