Aiming to help its users focus and avoid distractions, Meta-owned Instagram has launched Quiet mode. Once enabled, the Instagram Quiet mode will stop all notifications and change the account's activity status to let people know of it and automatically send an auto-reply when someone sends them a DM.
According to the company, anyone can use Quiet mode, but Instagram will prompt teens to do so when they spend a specific amount of time on the platform late at night. Quiet mode is available to everyone in the US, the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Instagram Quiet mode will be rolling out to more countries soon.
"Teens have told us that they sometimes want to take time for themselves and might be looking for more ways to focus at night, while studying and during school. You can easily customise your Quiet mode hours to fit your schedule and once the feature is turned off, we’ll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed," the company said in a statement.
Users who want to opt for the Quiet mode can activate it automatically at certain times of day. Outside those hours, Meta-owned Instagram will send the users a summary of their notifications.
Apart from the new Quiet mode, Instagram is also rolling out a few features designed to give people more control over the photos and videos they see on Instagram.
"We want to give people more control over the content they see on Instagram, so we’re introducing new features that allow people to tell us what content they don’t want recommended to them," the company noted.
With this, users can choose to hide multiple pieces of content in Explore that they are not interested in at one time. When they select Not interested on a post seen in Explore, Instagram will attempt to avoid showing them that kind of content going forward in other places where it makes recommendations, such as Reels, Search, among others.
"Next, while you can already hide comments and DMs containing specific words, we’re now expanding this feature to apply to recommended posts you might see across Instagram. Add a word or list of words, emojis or hashtags that you want to avoid — like 'fitness' or 'recipes' — and we’ll work to no longer recommend content with those words in the caption or the hashtag," the company added.
This can be accessed in the "Hidden Words" section of Privacy settings.