SnapChat removal of GIFs to clear the issue of racism, is causing outrage among the users. The fun of being on SnapChat gets lost when it happens on Friday morning that the GIF stickers get un available to amuse us on the platform.
GIF stickers “had been” the popular feature that used to add image overlays from the media repository Giphy. But the feature has gone due to a shocking report that said users were able to easily access racist animations on Snapchat.
A spokesperson for Snap Inc. regrets the GIF and apologized the users saying that “This GIF should have never appeared in Snapchat. Our team has worked with Giphy to have the GIF removed and it should no longer appear. We are in the process of removing GIPHY from our application until we can be assured that this will never happen again.”
GIF Stickers that were added to the app on 20th February this year. The feature was introduced to allow users to press a sticker button while the users edit a photo or video, choosing from the Giphy library for inclusion of a fun with little animation to their messages.
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William Parkes, a 21-year-old from Birmingham, England and a user of Snapchat, while he was loading up the feature, got shocked to find a racist animation in the library. He reported on Thursday that he could find a GIF with a racial slur that was followed by a “crime death counter.”
Through a Twitter post in a bid to respond to user “AngelicaOlssoon,” the support team of the app stated that the GIF Stickers feature has been disabled temporarily but the team also showed a hope for return of the feature soon to run the app with same previous amusement.
According to the reports from Inverse, while making the issue clear, the company said that the feature should only show those very images that are rated PG in Giphy’s library. Beyond this very rule, the Giphy community guidelines are quite clear that they “do not allow anything that slanders, demeans, or belittles another group or person based upon their race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.”
The service works on its strategies just like a search engine in which it indexes popular GIFs and search terms from across the web as well.
Snapchat is attempting to reassure users that GIF Stickers is not gone for good, but the company’s reassurance has not stopped its users from taking to Twitter to express their outrage that the feature has gone.
