Celebrity tweets give a sneak peek at what Instagram's comment filtering tool looks like
Intagram is rolling out the feature to profiles that attract a high number of responses from other users, a move designed to help people deal with online abuse and sift out spammy comments.
Teigen is among a set of accounts with a 'high volume' of comments who have been offered use of the feature / Twitter
The Facebook-owned social network confirmed at the tail end of last week that it was offering accounts with a high volume of comments the ability to moderate the "negative" ones.
Thus far, Instagram has been fairly coy around how the new service would work apart from hinting that it would give select users the ability to filter out keywords and turn off comments from individual posts.
Despite rumours that Taylor Swift was toying with the filter, the company hadn't confirmed which accounts were trialling the roll out.
However, earlier today model Chrissy Teigen revealed that she is among the chosen few, giving users a preview of how the product could look when it's rolled out more widely.
In a now deleted tweet, Teigen, who has in the past deleted social media accounts following abusive comments, said: "oh this is gonna be fun."
The picture gave an insight into how the test version of comment filter works. It appears that the tool lets users who receive loads of comments exclude ones that contain certain words. These words can be specially chosen by the user or selected from a default list that according to Instagram's blurb "contains the most commonly-used dereogotary and hateful words on Instagram," including swearing.
Teigen's next tweet appeared to confirm this, showing she'd chosen to block several words including 'Trump' and 'Colon' among others.
thank you, @instagram. pic.twitter.com/bp6dCNZHvi
— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) August 2, 2016
The social network's head of public policy Nicky Jackson Colaco told the Washington Post last week that the company's goal was to "make Instagram a friendly, fun and, most importantly, safe place for self expression."
"We have slowly begun to offer accounts with high volume comment threads the option to moderate their comment experience. As we learn, we look forward to improving the comment experience for our broader community," he added.
Deleting comments is nothing new - Facebook rolled out that option to all users long ago, but handing over power to moderate on Instagram is. Sites like Instagram and Twitter are facing increasing pressure to keep their users safe online and have built up whole teams to help combat abuse within their communities.