Why Snapchat and Instagram Have Pulled Giphy Stickers from Stories

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Over the weekend, you might have noticed that Snapchat and Instagram have removed the GIF sticker features, that were hosted by GIPHY. This change didn’t come for nothing. This change came about after an extremely racist GIF was given as an option to users scrolling for an appropriate GIF for their Instagram or Snapchat story.

The extremely offensive GIF was spotted both on Instagram and Snapchat, as they both use the service provided by GIPHY, an animated photo hosting website.

A Snapchat spokesperson has previously said that all GIFs in Snapchat are rated PG, meaning that this content is appropriate for anyone over the age of 13.

The GIF in question shows the phrase, “N****r Crime Death Counter – Keep Cranking Bonzo, the Numbers Just Keep on Climbing!” alongside a number ticker and a white game show style announcer.

Snapchat have since made a statement announcing how they instantly removed GIPHY as a service from their platform the moment they were made aware of what happened, to assure that this does not happen again.

The GIPHY community guidelines are meant to stop this type of content in the first place, before it ever hits anyone’s networks. Although, GIPHY works in a search engine like way, picking images from the top GIFs on the web, so things can slip through – even though they shouldn’t.

GIPHY have since, looked into the problem and diagnosed what went wrong in filtering their GIFs.

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.

Do you think huge companies like Instagram and Snapchat have to moderate their content more thoroughly? Tell us in the comments below

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