Reporting Abuse Live on Instagram Is Surprisingly Difficult
Harassment and abuse on social media sucks. Which also sometimes sucks: the inability or unwillingness of the various platforms to deal effectively with it. But sometimes you need to focus on what you can control and let go of the rest, which in this case means reporting the harassment.
This adds insult to injury when applications make it extremely difficult to figure out how to do it. BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos reports that when she asked twelve tech journalists if they could think of a way to report a personal message on Instagram, only one of them managed to crack the code.
The main obstacle is that the post message doesn’t work like any other Instagram reporting feature. Namely:
To report a photo: click “…” in the upper right corner of the message. To report a person or profile: click “…” in the upper right corner of the profile. own message: swipe left on the comment. To report a photo being sent to you in a direct message: Click on the circled “i” in the upper-right corner of the conversation.
This is all pretty intuitive if you use Instagram often enough. But to communicate what someone is saying in a private message (as opposed to the photo they send you), you have to use a completely different mechanism: long press on the text bubble, as if you were trying to select the text. Of course, you have two options: report and copy. It might sound counterintuitive and I hope you never have to use it, but at least now you know.