Snapchatters and Insta-fans were in for a rude surprise last week.
Users of the photo-sharing platforms spotted an extremely racist GIF that could have been added to their Snaps and/or Stories. The offending GIF appeared when someone searched for the word “Crime”.
Naturally, fans took to Twitter to notify Instagram and Snapchat of the issue… and their dismay.
Both Snapchat and Instagram have removed Giphy from their respective platforms. They’ve made it clear they won’t be reinstating the sticker feature until Giphy has sorted out the issue.
“As soon as we were made aware, we removed the GIF and have disabled Giphy until we can be sure that this won’t happen again . . . while we wait for Giphy’s team to take a look at it,” Snapchat said. Instagram also made it clear to the tech website that “this type of content has no place on Instagram” and that they “have stopped our integration with Giphy as they investigate the issue.”
In a statement to TechCrunch, Giphy said that “after an 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.”
Social media platforms have been working to crackdown on distasteful and hateful content, especially in the past year.
In 2017, Twitter started stamping out hate speech on its platform. YouTube has also made it clear that inappropriate content may be demonetized (and a channel’s “discoverability” suppressed) on its platform. Either way, there’s no place for racist stickers on Instagram, Snapchat or anywhere on the web…
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