According to Reuters, Snapchat and Instagram have removed Giphy from their platforms, after the feature suggested an extremely racist/hateful GIF to a user when searching the word “crime”.
The two social media platforms removed their Giphy integrations after learning about the issue. The hateful GIF appears to have been removed by Giphy, but Instagram and Snapchat are still to reactivate their Giphy features.
The GIF in question makes an offensive statement about race-based crimes, and it also contains the “N”word. Reason why its intent is considered it is overtly racist.
Last Friday, Techcrunch reported that a certain Twitter user, Lyauna Augmon posted a screenshot of the offensive image and tagged Instagram founder – Kevin Systrom, demanding that it should be taken down.
Lyauna Augmon said she when she searched “crime” in Instagram’s Giphy feature the offending GIF in question came up as a suggestion. The same GIF also appeared as a suggestion in Snapchat’s Giphy feature.
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Snapchat in a statement to TechCrunch says it has temporarily disabled the Giphy feature from its platform after it hearing about the problem.
They said, “As soon as we were informed, we removed the GIF and disabled Giphy until we can be sure that this won’t happen again … while waiting for Giphy’s team to take a look at it”.
Instagram similarly disabled Giphy after hearing about the hateful GIF and made this statement, “This type of content has no place on Instagram,” They added have stopped their integration with Giphy while they investigate the issue.”
Giphy, the online database and search engine that allows users to search for and share animated GIF files also apologized for the offensive GIF in a statement to Mashable and said it would be performing extra moderation for its library of GIFs. They explained that the GIF slipped through the cracks of its usual moderation due to a bug which was supposed to have been fixed earlier.
Note that Giphy’s terms of service state that users aren’t allowed to post content that is abusive, obscene, offensive, or vulgar.
Here’s what Giphy said in a statement. “After investigation of the incident, this sticker was available due to a bug in our content moderation filters specifically affecting GIF stickers. We have fixed the bug and have re-moderated all of the GIF stickers in our library. The Giphy staff is also further reviewing every GIF sticker by hand and should be finished shortly.”
Giphy added, “We take full responsibility for these recent events and sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended,”
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Giphy is a very new to both social media platforms. Instagram added the feature two months ago in January and Snapchat only just partnered with Giphy in February, reason why it wasn’t even available for a full month before getting disabled. Let’s hope this complication gets dealt with soonest, so that Instagram, Snapchat and Giphy could be able to render the services to their enormous database of users with no hassles.
