Snapchat and Instagram have temporarily removed their integrations with Giphy after users saw a racist GIF as an option to add to images
Context & Ripple Effects
GIF stickers were a fresh feature for both apps: Instagram only switched on Giphy-powered GIFs in Stories in late January (via its new GIPHY partnership), and Snapchat followed weeks later by letting users add Giphy stickers to posts (alongside new Friends and Discover tabs). The integrations put a third party's content library directly inside two of the biggest messaging surfaces.
The racist GIF surfaced through that pipe, and both platforms' response was to cut the integration rather than filter individual content — an admission that they cannot vouch for what Giphy serves at scale.
First-order effects
- Users of both apps immediately lose the GIF sticker option in Stories and posts, degrading features each platform had shipped within the previous two months to drive engagement.
- Giphy loses distribution inside Snapchat and Instagram simultaneously, cutting off the reach that made these partnerships valuable to it.
Second-order effects
- Reinstatement becomes a sequencing game between the two platforms: Snapchat restored GIPHY in early April explicitly after Instagram had already brought the service back a week earlier (following Instagram's reinstatement), showing neither wanted to be the last one without GIFs.
- The incident forces Giphy's other distribution partners to weigh whether its moderation can keep pace with its library, raising the bar for any future embed deals.
Third-order effects
- The episode establishes that platforms bear reputational cost for third-party content APIs regardless of who hosts the offending asset, pushing embed partners toward contractual moderation guarantees — a pattern the corpus bears out again when a 2019 report found toxic content persisting on Giphy despite its bans (including child abuse and white-supremacy imagery).
- If moderation failures keep recurring at the API layer, content licensing deals will increasingly bundle audit rights and takedown SLAs, reshaping how media libraries monetize distribution.
The trend: Third-party content libraries embedded into social platforms are being held to the host platform's moderation standard, making trust-and-safety performance a condition of distribution deals.