Instagram Adds New Anti-Spam Measures, Including Improved Engagement Filtering Tools

13 Dec 2023

Instagram’s announced some new spam combatting updates ahead of the holidays, designed to help reduce the manual curation load on users, and the overall impact of spam and junk in the app.

And as anyone who manages a big IG account knows, there’s a lot of spam activity happening every day, in varying forms.

IG says that it’s improved its automated detection of spam and bot profiles across the app, which will better enable it to provide more proactive filters to save creators from having to manually sift through spam comments, requests, etc.

Instagram will now provide several new elements:

“Potential Spam” – Instagram will now automatically filter all of the follow requests your account receives from likely spam profiles into a separate “Potential Spam” listing for you to review. This list will also include any existing followers that IG’s systems have flagged as likely spam or bot accounts.

Spam tags – Instagram’s also looking to take action on spam tags, with a new process that will enable you to bulk review all suspect tags, in order to remove them faster. All tag requests that you don’t take action on will be automatically deleted after 30 days.

Spam views – Instagram’s also experimenting with hiding views on your Stories that it’s detected as originating from likely spam accounts. “This will reduce these unwanted users’ ability to directly interact with you via story engagement.”

These are some good updates, which will streamline the spam management process, and help you refine and filter your audience, which can have flow-on benefits for analytics, engagement, etc.

In addition to these anti-spam measures, Instagram’s also expanding its Advanced Comment Filtering tools to also cover suspected spam replies.