Instagram’s announced some new spam combatting updates ahead of the holidays, designed to help reduce the manual curation load on users, and the overall impact of spam and junk in the app.

And as anyone who manages a big IG account knows, there’s a lot of spam activity happening every day, in varying forms.

IG says that it’s improved its automated detection of spam and bot profiles across the app, which will better enable it to provide more proactive filters to save creators from having to manually sift through spam comments, requests, etc.

As you can see in these example screens, Instagram will now provide several new elements:

• “Potential Spam” – Instagram will now automatically filter all of the follow requests your account receives from likely spam profiles into a separate “Potential Spam” listing for you to review. This list will also include any existing followers that IG’s systems have flagged as likely spam or bot accounts.
• Spam tags – Instagram’s also looking to take action on spam tags, with a new process that will enable you to bulk review all suspect tags, in order to remove them faster. All tag requests that you don't take action on will be automatically deleted after 30 days.
• Spam views – Instagram’s also experimenting with hiding views on your Stories that it’s detected as originating from likely spam accounts. “This will reduce these unwanted users’ ability to directly interact with you via story engagement.”

These are some good updates, which will streamline the spam management process, and help you refine and filter your audience, which can have flow-on benefits for analytics, engagement, etc.

In addition to these anti-spam measures, Instagram’s also expanding its Advanced Comment Filtering tools to also cover suspected spam replies.

Instagram’s also testing new alerts to better inform users of potential restrictions on their content.

“We want to help provide creators with more information that could help them stay recommendable. We’re currently testing some in-app nudges that will flag if some posts you uploaded may go against some of our guidelines. These nudges are meant to provide you with more education to make an informed choice about keeping or removing the content.”

Spam activity is always a pain, and when you’re working to provide the best experience to your audience, removing these elements is an essential step. As such, Instagram’s new anti-spam and anti-junk filters could be a big help, saving you time, and improving the user experience.

Though even with these improving filters, there’s still plenty of spam activity in Meta’s apps. And Meta’s probably can’t get rid of it all, but it is working to improve its systems, which will ideally help to refine your audience engagement.

You can read more about Instagram’s latest spam-battling updates here.