Instagram, a subsidiary of the wide reaching Facebook empire, has announced that they will be eavesdropping on private direct messages on their platform in an effort to penalize and expunge those who they deem are executing “hate speech.”
The company announced last week they will begin accessing and policing a user’s private messages completely contrary to the very notion of a private direct message between two parties.
A statement from the company said Instagram censors will be taking “more steps” “to help prevent” abusive messaging and hate speech in direct messages, citing a genre-specific occurrence involving “footballers in the UK.”
“So today we’re announcing some new measures, including removing the accounts of people who send abusive messages, and developing new controls to help reduce the abuse people see in their DMs.”
Instagram Announces Policing Of Private Direct Messages, Law Enforcement Team-Up In Latest ‘Hate Speech’ Crackdown https://t.co/lHnx5ctcP8 pic.twitter.com/nQnLYrsC9w
— The Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) February 15, 2021
The announcement made clear that Instagram’s “stance on hate speech” employs a zero-tolerance policy regarding “attacks on people based on their protected characteristics, including race or religion.”
“We strengthened these rules last year, banning more implicit forms of hate speech, like content depicting Blackface and common anti-Semitic tropes,” the Instagram statement read.
In a stunning admission of privacy violation, the company openly admitted they “took action on 6.5 million pieces of hate speech on Instagram, including in [direct messages], 95 percent of which we found before anyone reported it” (emphasis added). They indicated this Big Brother-style censorship took place between July and September of 2020.
The penalties for “abusive messages” are now even stricter. In the statement Instagram executives said they were upping the penalties for “abusive messaging.”
“Today, we’re announcing that we’ll take tougher action when we become aware of people breaking our rules in DMs,” the company’s statement continued. “Currently, when someone sends DMs that break our rules, we prohibit that person from sending any more messages for a set period of time. Now, if someone continues to send violating messages, we’ll disable their account.”
BREAKING REPORT: Instagram to permanently ban users that send "hate speech" in their PRIVATE Direct Messages…
— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) February 11, 2021
The Instagram statement went on to say that the company would disable any newly created accounts that seek to circumvent the messaging restrictions.
In January of 2021, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said their company and its parent company, Facebook, has a bias.
“We’re not neutral,” Mosseri stated boldly exposing the company’s ideological bias. “No platform is neutral; we all have values, and those values influence the decisions we make.”
Mosseri’s comments came almost immediately after the obviously coordinated censorship of President Trump by Twitter, Facebook, and subsequently YouTube.
Twitter disingenuously banned then-President Trump from their platform permanently, alleging the account was a “risk of further incitement of violence.”