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Melissa Harris-Perry: Sometimes words are just not enough when sending a quick note to a loved one, friend, or even work colleague to really capture how you feel. You just have to illustrate it with a handy little animation like Homer Simpson slowly sliding back to hide in the bushes.
Homer Simpson: Oh, okay.
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Melissa Harris-Perry: Or Steve Carell's character on The Office, Michael Scott, screaming--
Steve Carell: No, God. Please, no. No.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Or Kermit the Frog absolutely losing it.
Kermit the Frog: Yes. [screams]
Melissa Harris-Perry: Just in case you ever need them, there are even a few Melissa Harris-Perry GIFs out there. Wait, is it GIF or JIF?
Leonard: The G stands for graphics. That's a hard G, so I'd say GIF.
Raj: What? The guy who invented it says it's JIF.
Howard: I'm sorry. Do you mean the guy or the Juy?
[laughter]
Melissa Harris-Perry: That's how Big Bang Theory settled it, but apparently, those of us still grabbing those little animations and offering them up as hot takes are really just signaling how hopelessly out of it we really are. Earlier this week, the United Kingdom's antitrust regulators ordered that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is required to sell Giphy, the internet's top GIF database.
In recent years, GIF usage online has declined significantly so much so that Giphy is worried no other companies will buy them. In legal filings surfaced earlier this year, Giphy noted that young people are describing reaction GIFs as "cringe". Joining me now is Katie Notopoulos, senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News. Welcome to The Takeaway, Katie.
Katie Notopoulos: Hi, thank you for having me.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Take me back. What is the beginning? What's the origin story of GIFs?
Katie Notopoulos: They existed as a file format that people would use the same way they use JPEGs or stuff like that. There's different advantages to these different file types, but they really became used in the way that we know them now as short, funny, little clips, often a snippet from a TV show or a movie, in the 2010s, especially on Tumblr. That was a really big place for animated GIFs. People would repost them.
Sometimes they were just funny on their own. Sometimes they were used as a reaction to something, which is how they're most commonly used now is what's called the reaction GIF like the Steve Carell saying, "No, no, no," if someone writes something that you would want to respond no, no, no. [chuckles] They became more and more popular. There was a time where it was hard to actually make a GIF. You had to have photoshop skills.
It was technically difficult, so there was a small handful of people out there actually making the GIFs that everyone else was using. The technology to make it a little bit more accessible for everyone started coming out in the 2018s a little bit so that all of a sudden it became easy for anyone to download a clip from YouTube and quickly make a snippet GIF of it. More and more, they became a little bit of everyone could use it, not just the cool kids on Tumblr.
That's where we are at now where they're really popular. They became embedded into these big social platforms like Twitter, Facebook where you simply hit the little GIF button, and you can choose from a big library of different reaction GIFs so that you can pick whatever one you want to respond to something, instead of having to have sourced it on Tumblr or made it yourself. It's really easy. That's where the company Giphy came into play. It was the company that was creating these GIF libraries that would exist on Facebook and Twitter.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Now it's an option on your smartphone keyboard, so all of a sudden, you started seeing them come more swiftly. It wasn't like, "Oh my goodness, how did you have those available?" Everyone's got them available. Explain to me then how this antitrust case in the UK with Facebook, Meta, and Giphy-- Help me understand what's going on there.
Katie Notopoulos: Facebook purchased Giphy, which had been an independent company. Was independent and it was owned by something called Betaworks, which had a bunch of small little sites and tech companies. It bought Giphy a couple of years ago. It makes sense. People love using GIFs on Facebook, it allows Facebook to streamline the technology behind it. Giphy is not necessarily on its own a good business, but I think it was a case of Meta just loves buying small companies and just owning them. [chuckles] They bought them. [crosstalk]
Melissa Harris-Perry: That's the antitrust situation.
[laughter]
Katie Notopoulos: Exactly. There's plenty of instances of companies that Meta had seen as potential competitors, bought them up quickly and then they disappeared off the face of the Earth. There's actually an app that has recently had a small resurgence. A couple of years ago, there was an app called TBH, which is popular among teenagers. Basically, you give your friends little anonymous compliments over this app. It became minorly popular with teenagers. Facebook immediately bought it up, and then just disappeared it. It shut down, it was gone. The owner of that app just recently has relaunched almost exactly the same thing.
Facebook and Meta has been doing this for years, they buy up small companies, and sometimes it makes sense like Instagram, which at the time was a small company. Sometimes with Giphy, it makes sense where, okay, we can integrate this into our technology offerings, essentially. In the UK, in the US too, there is a sentiment and movement to use some antitrust stuff to break up these big companies, but particularly in the UK, they have said buying Giphy, that's too much. It's antitrust, it's a monopoly on essentially the GIF market. You have to sell off Giphy, and so they are going to have to do that now.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Apparently, there's some possibility no one will buy it because Gen Z is over GIFs. Help me understand why Gen Z has declared these cringe.
Katie Notopoulos: Yes. Giphy and Meta in its legal filings about why the UK shouldn't do this to them, one of the things they're claiming is that don't make us sell Giphy because no one's going to buy it. There's nobody else out there who wants this. [chuckles] It's not fair because the company will essentially just flounder and die. Part of the reason they gave is that GIFs are just not as popular as they once were when they first made the purchase.
I think the big thing is that young people view using reaction GIFs as something that boomers on Facebook do. That's totally Giphy and Meta's own fault because they made it so easy for people on Facebook who tend to be a little bit older, that's not where the teenagers are hanging out these days. They use reaction GIFs all the time and so teenagers who are cool and on TikTok, they look at that and they think, "Oh my God, that's so uncool." That's like skinny jeans or something really [crosstalk] uncool.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh my goodness, I also cannot wear the skinny jeans.
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Katie Notopoulos: [chuckles] That's what the teens say. That the trend is over and if you're still wearing the skinny jeans, you're passé.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Katie Notopoulos is senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News. Thanks so much for talking with us.
Katie Notopoulos: Thank you for having me.
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