India, March 15th, 2022: Instagram today announced a campaign ‘You Decide’, to encourage people to make use of the safety tools available for them and have better control over their experience on the platform. Bollywood youth icon, Ananya Panday, has also partnered with Instagram on the campaign, as part of her ongoing efforts to help young people have a positive online experience.
Instagram is used by young people in India to express themselves, and share their lives and pursuits, which are often work in progress. To enable this, the platform has a vast variety of safety tools and resources that are available for people to use. Some of these features have launched recently, such as Take a Break, Limits and Hidden Words, and many have been there for a while, like Restrict, Two factor authentication and Block. To create greater awareness for them, Instagram has partnered with actor Ananya Panday, whose own community @SoPositivedsr works towards creating better awareness about the way social media can be used for good.
‘You Decide’ is a digital campaign that will be amplified by 20+ creators such as actor and creator Sushant Divgikar, creator and podcaster Raj Shamani and one of Instagram’s 25 under 25 creators, Naveen Singh aka @bihariladka. The campaign will go on for 1month and also entails deeper partnerships with youth communities to reach young Indians across the country. They include @Sopositivedsr, which is the digital social responsibility by Ananya Panday and addresses online bullying; @wetheyoungindia, a youth focused community; @weareyuvaa, a youth media and insights company; and @under25official, a community and network of young people under the age of 25.
Sharing more about the campaign, Natasha Jog, Head of Public Policy for Instagram, Facebook India (Meta), said, “We want the time spent on Instagram to be meaningful and intentional, and that’s the premise behind this campaign. While we iterate to make our platform safer, campaigns like these will drive awareness for them. We’re thankful for the partnership with Ananya Panday, Sushant Divgikar and other creators and communities, who are supporting to drive this message across India.”
Actor Ananya Panday, said, “As a young person, I understand the need of constantly wanting to share more about oneself, keeping up with trending moments and emerging culture, and hence being on Instagram. But that needs to be balanced with the need to be safe online. That’s essentially the balance that I’ve previously articulated as my digital social responsibility, and taking it forward, I’m happy to be associated with Instagram’s ‘You Decide’, so we can together, help make a difference in more people’s lives.”
The campaign begins today, with a Live Room discussion between Ananya Panday, Sushant Divgikar and Natasha Jog from Instagram, hosted by @under25official. The participants will be sharing the creatives from Instagram, developed by Supari Productions, highlighting the safety features. This will be followed by a 1-month long campaign, where the communities will inform and engage with their youth audiences, through posts, stories, reels and community activations. For the latest updates on the campaign, follow #OnIGYouDecide on Instagram.
In the past couple of days, Instagram has also launched the Live Moderator feature for Instagram Live. With this feature, creators will have the ability to assign a moderator who will have the ability to report comments, turn off comments for a specific viewer, and remove a viewer from the Live entirely. Viewers who are kicked out of the Live will not be able to rejoin.
