Instagram Reels—home to fun and trendy dances, hilarious memes, and cute cat videos. Or at least that’s what it is like on a normal day. But today, users are flooding Instagram with complaints—their Reels are suddenly filled with violent, graphic, and gory content.
Instagram’s graphic content
Instagram users flooded social media with complaints about Reels suddenly being filled with graphic content. Some users claim that despite Instagram’s “Sensitive Content Control” enabled to its highest setting, they still ran into these types of violent content.
Meta’s moderation system failed to catch these videos, allowing them to appear in Reels. According to Meta’s policy, these types of content include “videos depicting dismemberment, visible innards or charred bodies,” along with “sadistic remarks towards imagery depicting the suffering of humans and animals.”
That’s why you may occasionally see Reels with a sensitive content warning. Instagram automatically blocks them from playing. Users have a choice if they want to watch it. So why does Meta allow users to watch these videos at all? The company believes that some graphic content can help raise awareness about certain issues.
Thankfully, you no longer have to avert your eyes. Meta apologized and shared a statement with CNBC, confirming they had fixed the problem. “We have fixed an error that caused some users to see content in their Instagram Reels feed that should not have been recommended. We apologize for the mistake.”
Instagram’s responsibility to users
Meta may have fixed the Instagram Reels issue, but this incident highlights a much bigger problem—social media platforms are still struggling to control the content that appears on users’ feeds. Instagram isn’t alone in this. Other social media platforms such as TikTok, Twitter/X, Facebook, and even YouTube have all faced backlash in the past over inappropriate, violent, or misleading content slipping through their moderation systems.
In the past, companies would rely heavily on human moderators to catch and remove such content before it reached the masses. However, this isn’t efficient, not to mention the ethics behind subjecting another person to watch these types of videos. This is where the use of AI comes in. But we all know AI isn’t perfect—yet. So what can these companies do? Perhaps it’s time for these companies to stop acting like they know what we want. Turn off the algorithm and let users make their own choices.