Instagram have announced they have decided to ban harmful images after facing criticism from a teenager’s father.<\/p>\n
They\u00a0will ban all graphic self-harm images as changes are being made in response to the death of British teenager Molly Russell. The photo-sharing social platform made the decision in response to many peoples anger over\u00a0distressing material about depression and suicide.<\/p>\n
Instagram\u2019s boss,\u00a0Adam Mosseri, had a meeting with health secretary Matt Hancock. In this meeting, Mr Mosseri admitted that the company had not done enough.<\/p>\n
Mosseri said:<\/strong> \u201cWe are not where we need to be on self-harm and suicide, and we need to do more to protect the most vulnerable,\u201d<\/p>\n Mosseri added:<\/strong> \u201cWe will get better and we are committed to finding and removing this content at scale.\u201d<\/p>\n Molly\u2019s father Ian Russell said he believed Instagram was partly to blame as they found material relating to depression and suicide when they looked at her account after her death.<\/p>\n Instagram announced a range of further measures including the removal of non-graphic images of self half from the most visible parts of its app\/website.<\/p>\n Jennifer Grygiel<\/strong>, a social media expert and assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University said:\u00a0\u201cAt-risk individuals will not be safe until Facebook takes it role as a global corporation and communications platform more seriously. These changes should have been made years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n Before the meeting, Mr Hancock said:<\/strong> \u201cSocial media companies need to do more, in particular, to remove material that encourages suicide and self-harm, so I\u2019m going to be asking other social media companies to act.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want people to go on to social media and search for images about suicide to get directed to yet more of that sort of imagery. They need help to not post more about suicide.\u201d<\/p>\n Mosseri<\/strong> took responsibility that the move was overdue. When he was asked in an interview with the Daily Telegraph about why Instagram had taken so long to tackle the issue, he said: \u201cWe have not been as focused as we should have been on the effects of graphic imagery of anyone looking at content.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is something that we are looking to correct and correct quickly. It\u2019s unfortunate it took the last few weeks for us to realise that. It\u2019s now our responsibility to address that issue as quickly as we can.\u201d<\/p>\n Before this movement Instagram just relied on users to report graphic images of self-harm as\u00a0it was advised by experts that allowing users to share their stories and connect with others going through similar situations could be helpful for their recovery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Instagram have announced they have decided to ban harmful images after facing criticism from a teenager’s father. They\u00a0will ban all graphic self-harm images as changes are being made in response to the death of British teenager Molly Russell. The photo-sharing social platform made the decision in response to many peoples anger over\u00a0distressing material about depression…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":11372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[487,489],"class_list":["post-11371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-instagram","tag-social-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11371"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11373,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11371\/revisions\/11373"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}