5 Instagram Settings You Might Want To Change

A great way of communicating with fellow Instagram users is through comments. Anybody who has access to your entries can post them. Depending on what’s in your photo or video, and what their preferences are, they may not always have good things to say.

There are things you can do to avoid undesirable and unsolicited messages from strangers. If setting your account to private is not an option, you can manage your comments and filter out responses that contain certain words and phrases. To do this on your Android or iOS device, launch the Instagram app and do the following:

1. Tap your profile photo in the bottom-right corner of the page, hit the three-line icon in the top-right, then go to “Settings.”
2. Tap “Privacy,” then select “Hidden Words.”
3. Make sure “Hide comments” is enabled — it should be, by default. This allows Instagram to automatically detect potentially offensive comments in an isolated part of your comments section, which you can choose to ignore.
4. If you want a more aggressive detection of offensive comments, enable “Advanced comment filtering.”

You can also make a list of words, emojis, or phrases you don’t want to see in your Instagram comment section. Follow these steps:

1. Under “Custom words for messages and comments,” tap “Manage custom words and phrases.”
2. Start adding words and separate each entry with a comma. This list can be updated at any time.
3. Go back to the “Hidden Words” page and enable “Hide comments” under custom words and phrases so that any comment containing keywords from your list — including common misspellings — will not be shown.

A more aggressive option is to disable comments completely for certain posts, so no one can post any responses, and you can take a digital break. Simply tap “Advanced settings” before hitting “Share” on a new post and enable “Turn Off Commenting.”