Major online services show New York as ‘Jewtropolis’ in vandalism attack
Mapbox, which provides maps for apps such as Snapchat that carried the anti-Semitic label, acknowledges ‘human error’ in failing to catch ‘disgusting’ change
In an act of “digital vandalism” of a mapping service used by major internet companies, New York City was renamed “Jewtropolis” on several popular online services on Thursday.
The anti-Semitic name was carried on online maps used in the Snapchat messaging app, as well as the apps of The Weather Channel, Citi Bike, real estate firm StreetEasy and others.
The apps all used data from the digital mapping service Mapbox, whose clients also include Uber, the Financial Times, Foursquare, Evernote and others. It was not immediately clear whether any of those sites had displayed the offensive name.
Snapchat called the change “vandalism,” stating that it began in “third party mapping data,” and said in a tweet, “We are working with our partner Mapbox to get this fixed immediately.”
In a statement Thursday, Mapbox acknowledged the cyber attack, saying it “has a zero-tolerance policy against hate speech and any malicious edits to our maps.”
Whatever mapping service that Snapchat, CitiBike, StreetEasy, (perhaps others) use — it seems — is showing New York City as "Jewtropolis" this morning. pic.twitter.com/nsVe8goLyo
— Micah Grimes (@MicahGrimes) August 30, 2018
It said it had restored the correct label of New York City “within an hour.”
It also identified the culprit of the “malicious edit” as a user who “attempted several other hateful edits. Our security team has confirmed no additional attempts were successful.”
The company explained: “We build systems so this does not happen. Our maps are made from over 130 different sets of data, and we have a strong double validation monitoring system. Our preliminary root cause analysis shows that this act of hate speech was properly detected immediately and put into quarantine for human review.”
For some reason, the edit was then approved and allowed to propagate to clients’ maps through a “human error,” Mapbox said.
@pisceschrist Thanks for bringing this to our attention. 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.
— Snapchat Support (@snapchatsupport) August 30, 2018
“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.”
The company promised “to investigate this act and make appropriate changes to further limit the potential for future human error.”
It added: “Security experts are working to determine the exact origin of this malicious hate speech. We apologize to customers and users who were exposed to this disgusting attack.”
