Instagram was pretty swift to remove GIFs from Stories after it came to light that Giphy which is the company charged with responsibility of overseeing the GIF library had permitted a racist image to slip through the library. This was the very same incident that prompted Snapchat to also removed GIF. According to the reports reaching us from our sources, users of Instagram are now able to add GIFs to their Instagram Stories because the feature has been restored.
As soon as Giphy was informed of the availability of the racist sticker in the library, the company removed it. The company then said that, “After investigation, a bug was found in our content moderation filters affecting stickers.” Since that time up until now, the bug has been resolved and Giphy claims that it has re-moderated the entire GIF sticker library four times in order that it can be entirely sure that there is no more unsuitable content. The company is also making tight moderations that are to come in the future so that the incident will not be repeated. It says that the future moderations will be tightened with “another level of Giphy moderation before each sticker is approved into the library. This is now a permanent addition to our moderation process.”
With the new measures and precautions adopted by Giphy, Instagram appears to be satisfied if not; it would not have allowed the GIFs on the platform. According to Instagram, “We’ve been in close contact with Giphy throughout this process and we’re confident that they have put measures in place to ensure that Instagram users have a good experience.” Although there are yet to be any sightings of the GIF stickers on the Instagram app, it should not take much time before users can be able to attach GIFs to their stories.
