L1ght cites problems not just on social media, but also in games popular among teens and children, such as Fortnite and Minecraft.įortune was able to independently confirm that, at the time of reporting, Giphy does host sexualized images of girls appearing under the legal age of consent. In early 2019, it was discovered that Instagram was being used to share links to private troves of child sexual imagery hosted on Dropbox. Facebook Messenger was responsible for nearly two-thirds of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child exploitation images made in 2018. Giphy has high-profile investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and was valued at $600 million in 2016-the last time the private company raised money, according to Crunchbase.Ĭontent on Giphy is just one part of an accelerating epidemic of sexual images of children being spread online. It also has an animated ‘sticker’ format that is integrated with Gen Z-centric platforms including Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch. They can be embedded both on web pages and in posts on platforms including Facebook, Twitter, iMessage, and Snapchat. The site hosts and plays looping, six-second clips in the GIF format (hence the name), often taken from films and television shows. Giphy isn’t quite a household name, but it is a nearly omnipresent part of the fabric of online social media.
These images are hidden from most users and even from Giphy’s moderation, but can, L1ght claims, be accessed using obscure search terms in public search engines. L1ght claims that by following those breadcrumbs, its proprietary search tools and team of researchers unearthed a “seedy underbelly” of content on Giphy, including nude and sexually explicit images of children. The non-explicit images are, Porat said, “the tip of the iceberg-the first breadcrumbs you see.” L1ght co-founder Ron Porat characterized the shared examples as “very, very mild in the context of what we see” on Giphy. L1ght also shared several other disturbing images hosted on Giphy, including another non-graphic depiction of sexual assault apparently lifted from a film. L1ght shared a few examples of the toxic content on Giphy with Fortune, including a short clip that, though not sexually explicit, depicted an adult male seemingly assaulting a girl who appeared to be pre-adolescent against a backdrop of white supremacist symbols. The report was released Friday by L1ght, an Israel-based content monitoring startup focused on making the internet safer for children.
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