When you’re one of the biggest celebrities in the world, a whole lot of attention tends to come with the territory. That’s just a given. As the second most followed celeb on Instagram though, when you find yourself in the middle of a fall out with two of the other biggest names on social media, that attention can turn sour at the drop of a Snapchat. And people will be very quick to comment on it.
Following a surge of negative comments on Taylor Swift’s Instagram when her beef with Kanye West and wife Kim Kardashian West hit a serious social media peak this week, Taylor has been given the ability to delete negative or abusive comments from her posts.
Using this brand new tool, Taylor (or the higher powers who run her account) are able to remove these sorts of comments all at once rather than having to manually scroll through thousands and thousands to delete them one by one, reports the Sunday Times.
In case you somehow managed to miss it, Taylor and Kanye’s ongoing argument about whether or not Tay had given Ye permission to refer to her as ‘that bitch’ he might still have sex with in his song Famous reared it’s ugly head again this week when Kim Kardashian West came to her husband’s defence on the matter and shared a video of Kanye on the phone to Taylor asking if she’d be okay with the song, on Snapchat obvs.
Next thing you know, Kim posted a series of snake emojis in a dubious tweet that fans understood to be directed at Taylor.
This then saw people posting snake emojis, among other upsetting comments, on Taylor’s Instagram where she had posted a response to Kim’s Snapchat video.
All of those snake posts seemed to disappear from Swifty’s account pretty quickly, however. And even though Instagram didn’t explicitly explain how those comments were wiped so swiftly, a source claimed that they were removed using a ‘new tool’ being developed to help celebs (and regular people) who receive ‘a high volume of comments’ to deal with abuse.
Apparently, the ability to mass remove negative comments is the latest in a move to protect significantly popular accounts from trolls. And it may eventually be made available to fellow social media superstars who receive Swift-esc volumes of comments too.
Social media expert, Mark Shaw, warns against this sort of censoring however. He told The Times: ‘When it was introduced social media like Twitter and Instagram was so popular because it removed the gatekeeper between the celebrity and their fans.
If you start manipulating ordinary members’ comments to make the celebrities look wonderful all the time, there’s going to be a backlash.’
Which to be honest, I can kind of see coming if the tool is misused but it’s a difficult balance to try and navigate. What normally acts as a phone sized window into the beautiful lives of the rich and famous can all too easily become a means to access people, celebrity or otherwise, for the sake of trolling sending them abuse which really isn’t okay.
Although Instagram didn’t comment directly on Taylor’s case, they did say: ‘We’re always looking for better ways to help people prevent spammy or inappropriate comments on Instagram’.
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Follow Jazmin on Twitter @JazKopotsha
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.