Instagram’s ‘limits’ adds a mute button for everyone other than close friends

Instagram is expanding “limits,” a safety control you can use to hide DMs and comments from accounts who may be harassing you. Now, instead of just hiding content from recent followers or people who don’t follow you, Instagram will mute incoming messages from everyone except the users on your close friends list.

Even though Instagram first rolled out limits to help creators deal with harassment campaigns, anyone can use the feature if they’re facing unwanted messages and comments from bullies and other bad actors. It could give a way to shut down incoming noise without disconnecting people from a supportive community.

When limiting interactions from everyone but close friends, you’ll only see DMs, tags, and mentions from the people on your list. Users not on your close friends list can still interact with your posts, but you won’t see these updates. These accounts also won’t know that you’ve hidden their content. You can also choose to view or ignore the limited comments and DMs.

Instagram lets you limit accounts for up to four weeks at a time, but you can extend it. You can enable limits by tapping your profile, selecting the hamburger menu in the top-right corner of the screen, and choosing Limited interactions. From there, you can toggle on limits for Accounts that aren’t following you, Recent followers, or Everyone but your Close Friends.

Instagram is also building on its restrict feature, which now lets you prevent a user from tagging or mentioning you in addition to hiding their comments. These expanded features come as Instagram faces increased scrutiny from the US government over the safety of its young users. Earlier this year, Meta rolled out a new feature that prevents adults from messaging minors on Instagram and Facebook by default. The company also moved to hide suicide and eating disorder content from teens on both of its platforms.