Facebook announced its $400 million assimilation of the GIF platform Giphy on Friday, adding another jewel to the crown of one of Silicon Valley’s vastest empires. With billions of users on its main social network alone, Facebook reigns over a population that would make the British Empire feel inadequate. The social network’s prized territory isn’t bound to any land; it’s the space between your ears, rich in juicy data, and by bringing Giphy into the fold, it now owns the internet’s favorite form of emotional expression.
As with so many Big Tech companies, Facebook is in the people business. Its users are the real product, and like a mold, its tendrils reach into every fleshy inch of the human mind, grasping at whatever data it can find.
Whenever you update your status on Facebook or like a photo on Instagram, you’re offering up data to the machine. Companies want to know you to better advertise their products to you, and by offering platforms for self-expression, Facebook makes it easy for billions of users to hand over that information.
GIFs are the dominant mode of expression on the internet these days, with every popular social app offering some form of GIF integration — many of them in the form of a GIF keyboard that uses Giphy’s gigantic database. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a GIF, playing dozens of frames per second, is worth significantly more than that. A GIF lets you say so much without having to actually say anything at all.
GIFs instantly convey a wealth of emotion without having to struggle to find the right words to avoid misinterpretation or offense. Did your relative post an anti-vax article on Facebook? Don’t write an essay debunking them, just hit ‘em with the Picard facepalm. Friend got a promotion? Gatsby toast. Coworkers having a heated argument about Star Wars in Slack? Peace out.
Now that Facebook has assumed direct control over Giphy, one can only expect it will harvest even more info about users. Your choice of GIFs might not seem significant, but to corporations, it could say a lot about you.
Perhaps you rely on clips from Game of Thrones or Great British Bake Off; that tells them about your tastes. After a tough day at work, you might post a GIF to sublimate your rage; that could inform the ads they serve up. By controlling the means of GIF sharing, Facebook has a view into your raw emotions, one more step to knowing more about you than you know about yourself.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Instagram is testing a new format for long-form videos called Features. It allows select creators to upload horizontal videos running up to 90 minutes long. Instagram has already tested the new format with creators in Brazil, and now, it's expanding to tens of thousands of creators across the US.
How will Instagram's new Features format work?