Snapchat's mapping feature was briefly vandalized on Thursday morning to display New York City as "
The vandalism was only present for a few hours, but dozens of other mobile apps and internet services may have also briefly circulated the same anti-Semitic term. The reason? Apparently, a whole tech ecosystem has been sourcing its location data from a Wikipedia-like mapping library that anyone can edit.
"Unfortunately we have to confirm that this data originated with our editable map project," OpenStreetMap said in a blog post. "This vandalism was detected and fixed within 2 hours, and the vandal was blocked from contributing further."
OpenStreetMap is a freely editable map, which sometimes attracts vandalism. We condemn anti-semitism, and the recent defacement around New York. The community fixed this issue within 2 hours, and the vandal has been blocked from further editing. https://t.co/34UCrPCELm — OpenStreetMap (@openstreetmap) August 30, 2018
OpenStreetMap is free, but its data is used by a private tech company called Mapbox, which provides location services to Snapchat and dozens of other mobile apps, giving Mapbox a network of over 420 million monthly users.
According to OpenStreetMap, the vandal actually made the offensive edit 20 days ago, but "delayed processing" made the change evident across Mapbox's network by Thursday.
Mapbox has so far refrained from naming OpenStreetMap as the source of the vandalism. But the company issued a statement that apologised for the anti-Semitic comment infiltrating the company's location data. "Our maps are made from over 130 different sets of data, and we have a strong double validation monitoring system," it said.
"Our AI system flags more than 70,000 map changes a day for human review. While our AI immediately flagged this, in the manual part of the review process a human error led to this incident," Mapbox added.
The act of hate speech that has affected our map users has been resolved. We will not accept hatred on our platform. We removed the attack within an hour of discovery and this is cleared on all maps at this time. Full statement here: https://t.co/V8KWZTSeT9 pic.twitter.com/3tyOmyWAlv — Mapbox (@Mapbox) August 30, 2018
The incident highlights the downside of internet services relying on crowdsourcing for data. Earlier this year, for example, a vandalised Wikipedia entry led a Google search result to link California Republicans to Nazism, irking conservatives.
The developers behind OpenStreetMap acknowledged that the editable nature of their platform can make it easy to abuse. PCMag noticed one such edit recently listed a neighbourhood in Mountain View, California, as a "public defecation area" before it was taken down by a moderator.
Despite the vandalism, OpenStreetMap said, "Over the years we've found, as something of a triumph of human nature, that the vast majority of editors want to come together to help build something great, and these massively outnumber the few bad apples."
The platform is also working on better tools to help the community detect and address vandalism faster.