Instagram expands its anti-bullying warnings to captions

Instagram will now warn you if a post is going to make you look like a jerk. The company revealed Monday that it’s expanding its anti-bullying tools to cover photo and video captions. Instagram first introduced its AI-powered feature over the summer, when it began notifying users before posting if their comments might be considered offensive.

It’s no secret that social media has something of a bullying problem. Social platforms have been floundering trying to get a grip on online abuse, some with more success than others.

Stop right there — Instagram has slowly been adding more and more anti-bullying tools to its arsenal in an effort to curb malicious activity. While its offensive content warnings, which rolled out in July, were previously only applied to the comments section, posts themselves are now subject to the same scrutiny.

“Today, when someone writes a caption for a feed post and our AI detects the caption as potentially offensive, they will receive a prompt informing them that their caption is similar to those reported for bullying,” Instagram explained in a blog post. “They will have the opportunity to edit their caption before it’s posted.”

So, if a little warning pops up on your next post before you hit Share, you might want to reconsider that caption.