The image-sharing platform Facebook agreed to acquire in 2020 was Giphy. Giphy became widely known as a searchable library and sharing service for animated GIFs, allowing people to find short looping images and embed them in messages, posts, and other online services.
Facebook announced the deal in May 2020, with a reported value of about $400 million. The plan was to integrate Giphy with Instagram while continuing to operate the service. Facebook said Giphy already received substantial traffic from its services, which made the acquisition strategically useful for visual communication across its apps.
The acquisition faced scrutiny from the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority, which concluded that the deal could harm competition. Meta ultimately sold Giphy to Shutterstock in 2023 for a reported $53 million. That later sale does not change the answer: Giphy was the platform Facebook acquired in 2020.