Searching for the word “dog” in Instagram’s story function revealed that the emoji is a takeaway box related to Chinese and American food, angering those who worry that the app is increasing racial stereotypes.

According to posts on the internal Facebook message board, Instagram employees noticed the problem over the weekend, and users of popular photo-sharing apps have been complaining about the problem since 2019. Instagram is owned and operated by Facebook.

“How can we recommend emojis here, and can we delete this emoji so as not to perpetuate Asian racial stereotypes?” The employee wrote that the employee serves as the manager of the Instagram Product Integrity Program. “I have tested with 3 family members and the results are shown.”

In tests conducted on Apple devices, BuzzFeed News showed that Chinese-American food containers attempted to place emojis or GIFs in the story when searching for “dogs”, and a short image or video attached to the profile for a 24-hour period. The takeaway box is one of the seven possible emoji search results for the word, along with emojis of actual dogs, paw marks, and hot dogs.

Unable to use Instagram to copy results on Android devices. The story feature on Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook apps has no searchable emojis, nor does it show racist results.

A Facebook representative told BuzzFeed News that the company is investigating the issue.

A Facebook spokesperson said: “We have removed the emoji from this search and are investigating the cause of this emoji so that we can take steps to prevent it from happening again.”

After the story was published, the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri (Adam Mosseri) Say on twitter The takeaway box emoji is associated with the word “dog bag”, causing it to appear when searching for “dog”.

He said: “Since then, we have deleted the search term, and we apologize for the misunderstanding caused.”

The problem exists at least in 2019. In October of that year, One person tweeted They were looking for “cute puppy gif on Instagram” but came across a takeaway box.

“Why should I search for dogs on @instagram, and then Chinese food appears?” Another woman tweeted In early 2020.

Jennifer 8 Lee, the vice chairman of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, helped the new emoji get approved, saying that the mistake was Instagram’s fault. Although emojis are associated with certain keywords, there is no basis in unicode. Unicode is a standard for processing text consistently across devices, and it is impossible to associate “dogs” with emojis that people are worried about.

Li said: “Dog is not the keyword of “takeaway box” in Unicode. Fortune Cookie Chronicles, This is a book about American Chinese food. “It must happen at the platform level, and someone screwed it up.”

Li said the link between the dog and the emoji in the takeaway container-actually American invention -Echoes the racist caricatures that occurred when Chinese workers came to the United States in the 1800s. As immigrants began to build American railroads, the food became distinctive in the “us and them” narrative, and Chinese workers were portrayed as “strangers eating dogs, cats, and mice on our shore.”

Li added that although some Asian countries offer dog meat, she pointed out that white Americans sometimes eat atypical animals like crocodile skin. She said: “What I want to say is that ordinary Chinese never eat dogs in their lives, just like ordinary Americans do not eat crocodiles in their lives.”

This is far from the first time that Facebook products have been hit due to alleged cultural sensitivity. In 2018, after the deadly earthquake in Indonesia, the country tried to remind relatives and friends of their safety or those who expressed condolences on the platform Festive balloons displayed After the platform cannot understand that the word “survival” in Indonesian also means “celebration”.

This year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Instagram mislabeled coronavirus misinformation The story shows a screenshot of a commemorative tweet by Kim’s daughter Bernice King, which has nothing to do with the pandemic.

An Instagram spokesperson said: “Our system incorrectly flagged a screenshot of this tweet as a vaccine error message.” Said at the time. “We have now removed the incorrect tags from these posts.”