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.
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." Mapbox later responded with a statement calling the change “disgusting” and a “hate-speech attack.” The company said it has systems in place to make sure changes are valid, and that this one was initially blocked by AI. However, a human reviewer then approved the change, in what Mapbox is calling an error. “We will continue to investigate this act and make appropriate changes to further limit the potential for future human error.”
The changes appeared to be visible as early as 5AM ET, judging by a tweet sent at the time. 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. Mapbox said it was able to remove the vandalism “within an hour,” however that seems to be more like an hour from when the change was starting to be widely noticed.
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