Snapchat, Weather Channel, and others hit with anti-Semitic vandalism

New Yorkers who opened up Snapchat, The Weather Channel, CitiBike or a number of other apps and services this morning found that the name of their city had been swapped with anti-Semitic vandalism, replacing it with “Jewtropolis.”

The offensive change appears to have been a result of edits to Mapbox, a widely used service that powers the maps inside of all these apps and more. The change was also spotted inside the app for StreetEasy and on The New York Times’ map of 2016 election results. Mapbox also lists Vice, Vox (our sibling site), and the FCC as groups that have made use of its maps, however the vandalism didn’t show up on those sites.

Mapbox did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Snap tweeted that “Snap Map relies on third party mapping data which has unfortunately been subject to vandalism. We are working with our partner Mapbox to get this fixed immediately.”

The changes appeared to be visible as early as 5AM ET. By around 9AM, it appeared that the maps were in the process of being fixed, with the offensive name only being visible at certain view levels on some maps.

Online maps have been subject to vandalism many times in the past, often because individual users can suggest changes. A few years ago, someone edited Google Maps to place an image of Google’s Android logo peeing on an Apple logo somewhere in Pakistan. Google shut down the editing tool that allowed that to happen the next year. And just this week, Google Maps was edited to rename the Russell Senate Office Building after Senator John McCain — something has been proposed, but has not yet happened. It was quickly reversed.

Those changes are less problematic, but they speak to the immense problems that mapping services open themselves up to by failing to vet changes that can appear in front of millions of people. It’s not clear how the change was made to Mapbox — whether it was internal vandalism or user-suggested — but either way, it shows that more checks need to be in place.