According to the reports reaching us from our sources, Instagram and Snapchat have both gotten rid of their Giphy sticker feature after a user came upon a racist GIF that could be added to story posts.
Earlier this year, both Instagram and Snapchat added a Giphy integration to their stories feature that permitted the adding of GIFs by users from a program library of GIFs to their stories. A user of Twitter, Lyauna Augmon posted a screenshot of the violative image and then tagged the founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, and demanded that the GIF be removed. According to our sources, the GIF was displayed when someone searched for the word “Crime.”
Giphy gives users permission to post content to its site, and according to its terms of service, users are not allowed to post content that is abusive, obscene, offensive, or vulgar. A Giphy spokesperson said in a statement that, the GIF was removed after it had been discovered. The online GIF database has since that time fixed the problem and is reviewing every sticker it offers by hand at the moment:
“A user discovered an offensive GIF sticker in our library, and we immediately removed it per our content guidelines.
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.
We take full responsibility for these recent events and sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended.”
In one of the many statements that were made to some of our sources, Snapchat said that it removed the GIF and has also halted its integration with the Giphy in the meantime “while we wait for Giphy’s team to take a look at it.” Instagram on its own part also stated that it has done the same.
