Instagram to Send Warnings Before Disabling Your Account

Are you behaving badly on Instagram, or are objections to your posts unwarranted? Going forward, the Facebook-owned app will provide warnings about impending account bans and give you a chance to appeal photo deletions.

A policy update means Instagram will notify people when their accounts are on the verge of being banned, according to a company blog post.

It’s also tweaking the way it decides to disable an account. “Under our existing policy, we disable accounts that have a certain percentage of violating content,” the post says. “We are now rolling out a new policy where, in addition to removing accounts with a certain percentage of violating content, we will also remove accounts with a certain number of violations within a window of time.”

Translation: Under the old rules, prolific posters could, in theory, get away with more objectionable content than someone who posts every once in awhile because one terrible post out of 10 would yield a higher percentage than one terrible post out of 500.

Violations, meanwhile, include posting nude photos, stealing intellectual property, and creating an account while underage. Before Instagram scraps years of your accumulated cat pictures and brunch shots, you’ll receive a notification explaining why a post was removed and what you can do to plead your case.

For now, you can only petition content breaching Instagram’s nudity, harassment, terrorism, drug, and hate-speech rules, but the company said it will eventually include more options (though that list seems to run the gamut of possible bad behavior). If Instagram wrongly deletes a post and you bring it to the company’s attention, it’ll restore it and remove the mark from your record.

Social media companies have, by necessity, become more vigilant in policing sites to combat endless internet toxicity. Last year, Instagram adopted machine learning to weed out bullies. And last month, Twitter added warnings to world leaders’ tweets that violate its policy (though Trump’s subsequent and inevitable racist remarks still made it through ). Instagram’s policy update is good for people prone to unjust bans, but it remains to be seen how much it’ll do to clean up ever-growing online toxicity.