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Facebook’s Acquisition of Giphy Could Have an Unexpected Chilling Effect
New content moderation policies, if enacted, would reshape how we communicate online
Facebook’s recent acquisition of Giphy — if it goes through as planned — will give the social media giant more than just a sprawling database of animations to play with: It opens the door to a host of complicated new content moderation issues.
Giphy hosts content that can be more risqué than what Facebook generally shows through its GIF search tools — such as logos for porn companies, or GIFs with swear words written on them — and its library extends far beyond what you can find through Facebook’s own apps. This leaves Facebook with a choice: continue to host R-rated content via Giphy, or enforce its preferences on the rest of the internet.
While Giphy (like Facebook) bans obscene content including explicit pornography, violent imagery, and hate speech, it gives some leeway to certain edge cases of adult content. Users aren’t allowed to upload images of naked people, but they can upload almost naked people in suggestive poses. Giphy uses content rating guidelines that resemble MPAA ratings on films — including PG, PG-13, and R — to denote how appropriate a specific GIF is for different types of audiences, and developers that embed Giphy search in their apps can choose to filter results from Giphy’s library with certain ratings.
Facebook appears to use this feature to limit the kind of content that can show up when searching for a GIF while posting on the site or using Messenger. For example, the now-infamous clip of Elon Musk smoking weed on the Joe Rogan podcast can be found many times over in Giphy’s library. It’s among the top results when searching for “weed” on Giphy’s site, alongside similar smoking images of Bill Hader, Wiz Khalifa, and the geek from The Breakfast Club. According to Giphy’s content ratings, “mild substance use” would classify all of these as at least PG-13.
