We got duped. That’s right, Giphy told us (and a lot of other people) that now you can put GIFs on Facebook. Once supported on Facebook, the file format, as our story explained, is back — all thanks to Giphy working with Facebook to make it so.

Except that’s apparently not what happened.

See also: 10 Tips and Tricks for the Facebook iPhone App

What Giphy is providing on Facebook is not true animated GIFs. And here’s the clincher: Facebook told Mashable Thursday it “does not support animated GIFs.”

Want clear evidence of that fact? Take a look at the “GIF” shared by Gap on its Facebook page.

Post by Gap.

“Click below to watch our first GIF on Facebook,” it says.

The first sign of trouble is that you have to click to play. That’s not very GIF-like. If you live on Tumblr or have visited any number of other GIF-featuring sites (guilty!), you know they run in a loop — a never-ending loop and, unless coded otherwise, are usually running when you arrive on the page. There are some GIFs that only play on hover or click, but even the play button on this GIF looks wrong.

That’s because it is.

A right click on the “GIF” bears this out and proves this is a Flash file. Somewhere in the transition from the Giphy platform to Facebook, a conversion took place. This is not a GIF.

I wish we’d realized this sooner. Mashable was among the many sites that proclaimed the GIF is back on Facebook. Sorry about that.

Once we found out it wasn’t a GIF file, we asked Giphy what was going on. They told Business Editor Todd Wasserman it's a GIF in the sense that "it runs in a continuous loop."

No. That does not make it a GIF. GIF is a file format. It’s a file type like, a Word Doc (.Doc) or a JPEG (.JPG). By Giphy’s definition, anything that loops could be called a GIF. History repeats itself, so let’s call it a “GIF.” Rollercoasters loop, so let’s call them “GIFs.”

In an email conversation with Giphy co-founder and CEO Jace Cooke, I tried to get some clarity.

Me: I'm wondering why you would characterize this as GIF on Facebook when that is not the case. Cooke: Not really sure I follow your logic. What one shares via Giphy is indeed a GIF, while the embed solution does entail a Flash wrapper. This is indistinguishable from how a YouTube video is embedded. Would you call those not really video files simply because of that use of Flash?

Cooke’s logic is flawed since video is not a file format. You can have different kinds of video files (AVIs, MPEG4). Flash can be a format and a wrapper for other kinds of content, including GIFs. But in this case, that wrapper changes the nature and function of the file. The Giphy “GIF” that plays in Facebook mobile (on iOS) is housed in an iframe and has to expand to nearly full-screen to play. Real GIFs play in position.

No matter how you slice it, native animated GIFs are not playing on Facebook.

Although Cooke and I were having a semantics disagreement, Giphy does in fact agree with my characterization. I received this crystal clear and very helpful email from Cooke's co-founder and CTO Alex Chung:

Facebook does not support the GIF file format. They did at one point but then they took out support for it. People have tried to 'hack' this over the years and Facebook has quickly fixed or removed the hacks. We asked Facebook about GIF support and they indicated there are no current plans to support them natively, so we found a way to 'embed' GIFs using supported Facebook APIs. Giphy built and launched this on their own using these public API's. We do this right now with a workaround that allows us to wrap all our GIFs in a SWF of MP4 for playing within Facebook posts, Timeline and comments. You're right this is not native GIF format support but it is the first time you've been able to find a GIF on the Internet and then get it to play on Facebook. We think that's really awesome. We hope Facebook will support the .gif native format someday and we are lobbying them to do so but that is up to them. Until then this method is not a 'hack' but a legitimate approved Facebook publicly supported API.

There you have it. Maybe a bit of overreaching, but it appears Giphy's heart is in the right place. As for Facebook, the company wouldn’t comment further on Giphy, why it still doesn't support the animated GIF file format and when, if ever, it will.