Apple Is Rushing to Remove Porn From iMessage GIF Searches

Apple’s iOS 10 lets you send GIFs directly through its Messenger app, but you might want to check twice before getting too keyboard-happy — there’s still a lot of porn on there. The company preemptively made it so not-safe-for-work searches wouldn’t return any results, but people have quickly found that the company hasn’t been quite as successful at hiding porn as it thought.

First reports surfaced of a perverse GIF depicting a character from My Little Pony in a compromising position being one of the search results for “butt.” Apple later blocked any results for “butt” from iMessage’s built-in animated GIF search tool.

Another report said that an eight-year-old girl was shown “a very explicit image” of “a woman giving oral sex to a well endowed male” when she searched for the word “huge.” Repeated searches with the same term have shown that Apple no longer allows iMessage users to find “huge” GIFs, either:

Apple seems to be doing something similar to Instagram’s new harassment filter — it’s blocking specific words from appearing in iMessage’s search results. But it likely has little control over the results on a more granular level because iMessage’s animated GIF search is powered by Microsoft’s Bing.

It’s important to note that Apple isn’t blocking pornographic GIFs from being sent via iMessage, it simply isn’t allowing them to appear in the app’s default search. This is probably meant to avoid problems like the one above, where a child using an adult’s phone can be exposed to something they shouldn’t see, while still allowing adults to send each other whatever raunchy GIFs they’re able to find.

This is far from the only problem with iOS 10, which has also been bricking people’s iPhones and iPads since its release on Tuesday. But it’s yet another sign that iOS 10’s troubled rollout hasn’t been fixed yet.