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‘Sexual’ use of eggplant and peach emojis banned on Facebook, Instagram
- thrower123 7y agoThe endless cycle continues... Sex sells, and has always been a big, if unspoken or understated, factor in the rise of these social media platforms. But then they reach critical mass, and the puritanical purges start...
- ape4 7y agoGood luck with that
- klyrs 7y agoI'm so impressed at Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech. Such bravery in the face of adversity! /s
- buboard 7y agoWhat about bananas and carrots?
- TallGuyShort 7y agoAnd cherries and water droplets.
- warent 7y agoI'm not really sure what group they're catering to here. Everyone who is at least 12 years old knows what those emoji mean. My guess is they must be doing this in order to help protect women from sexual harassment. What they're really doing here is trying to ban an entire way of thinking. That's just not going to happen.
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- chmod775 7y ago> I'm not really sure what group they're catering to here. My best bet is a certain generation of people in the US who grew up shielded and learning to react with outrage and emotional breakdowns to absolutely anything outside their narrow comfort zone. Not even their children, who grew up with access to the internet and thus unfiltered humanity, can take them serious on these issues. But I guess it makes someone happy and it's too late to change some people anyways. This restriction doesn't really impair anyone fundamental rights and it's a minor annoyance at worst. What gives? > My guess is they must be doing this in order to help protect women from sexual harassment. This is a possibility. Somehow I doubt this will make any difference though. You don't stop creeps by taking away a random thing when there's millions of other ways.
- pentae 7y agoI'd say the group of people at the iOS App review board.
- fortran77 7y agoIt would make sense to respond to a complaint for a direct message that contained these emojis.
- warent 7y agoFor starters, the issue isn't remotely as rampant for men as it is for women who routinely (i.e. multiple times a day) receive unsolicited sexual advances offline and online in the form of dick pics. It's also much easier for a man to physically take advantage of a woman than vice versa, so women would naturally feel much more threatened by this behavior. Men's inboxes just aren't constantly getting filled with unsolicited nudes, and those that are received rarely cause men to feel concerned that it could lead to real aggravated sexual assault.
- jandrese 7y agoWhat if I use suggestive emoji for political purposes? Will they allow it then?
- excalibur 7y agoYes, but only if you're paying them.
- Cenk 7y ago> The Facebook Community Standards language is quite broad, not naming the emojis specifically but referring to “[commonly used] sexual emojis or emoji strings” as criteria which qualify as “Suggestive Elements.” > “[Content] will only be removed from Facebook and Instagram if it contains a sexual emoji alongside an implicit or indirect ask for nude imagery, sex or sexual partners, or sex chat conversations” > “We aren’t taking action on simply the emojis.” > Nude photos where emojis cover genitalia, butts or female nipples are also now formally not allowed
- GuiA 7y agoThank god nude photos where male nipples cover female nipples are still fine.
- pushpop 7y agoYou’re getting downvoted yet you’re making a very clear point of inequality. Maybe this is where the American (Facebook) and European (myself) cultures differ but here it’s perfectly acceptable for women to be topless in much the same way as how it’s perfectly acceptable for a man to be topless.
- abstractbarista 7y agoIt's truly astounding how uncomfortable many Americans are with breasts in general. I'm an American but I never understood this. Probably because I became skeptical of religion from a pretty young age.
- dmix 7y agoThat's not Europe vs America, that's some parts of Europe vs the rest of the world. Public nudity is very much the exception globally not the rule. But it's interesting what selective stuff people give the US credit.
- pushpop 7y agoIt’s not just Europe though. For example Australia has similar sensibilities too. Maybe a more accurate description might be: countries predominantly atheist verses countries which are not. Regardless of you want to define it, a female nipple is still no more offensive than a male one.
- wishinghand 7y agoDoes this apply to private chats? Because I'll send these in a joking way to my girlfriend and some of my other friends. I know that Facebook messenger parses chats and won't allow porn site links and torrent magnet links to go through.
- m-p-3 7y agoThey even parse/censor private/encrypted chat locally on the device, they cannot mind their own business.
- cronix 7y agoIt's interesting how we still refer to them as "private messages" or "private chats" when we know full well everything is being analyzed, as evidenced by your post.
- abstractbarista 7y agoWoah wait, they're blocking magnet links too?? That's horrible. It's already disgusting that they block porn links. Why are they censoring private speech between friends?
- wishinghand 7y agoI haven't torrented in a while but I shared a non-piracy one for downloading creative commons game assets with someone about 5 years ago and it just wouldn't go through. I forget the automated message Messenger would give me but it was basically "We think this is illegal file sharing".
- ryanmercer 7y agoRemoving porn links by default probably removes a considerable amount of spam and to keep creeps from sending your 12-year-old or your grandma graphic porn links.
- mic47 7y agoI guess this applies to reported content, and maybe for content for wider audience (like public post / group / ...)? I.e. if you send eggplant to your GF via chat, and she does not report you, it's fine. But if she receives private eggplant sex message from some rando and she report him, that should count as violation.
- cs702 7y agoSexual use of eggplant and peach emojis is banned...but political propaganda is still A-OK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21407531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21407531
- ratsimihah 7y agoNews these days.
- mrfredward 7y agoIf Facebook really wanted to stop this they could make the eggplant less phallic looking or remove it entirely. Almost no one is going on Facebook to actually talk about eggplant. They don't want users to have the same plausible deniability when sharing a cartoon wiener that they had when adding a cartoon wiener as an option. And honestly, it is probably for the better that sexual harassment via eggplant is now explicitly called out in the TOS. I don't expect much enforcement of this. Edit: Wow, the eggplant lobby found my post. To be clear, I'm not against the eggplant emoji, or its sexual connotations, but I am convinced that it gets used exactly the way its designers expected it to be used.
- elliekelly 7y agoThis is what I find most confusing. If Facebook’s goal is to decrease the frequency of the eggplant & peach emojis being used as sexual references there are a million ways to “nudge” users in that direction. Make the eggplant & peach emojis sliced and I bet they’d just about disappear. Why police content, especially this content that seems like a total non-issue, when they’re in the middle of a giant PR campaign trying to convince users they shouldn’t police content any content? I’ve never once heard someone complain about emoji sexual innuendo and if Facebook’s motives are to stop sexual harassment that might be the most half-hearted attempt in history. Someone who wants to sexually harass a person via Facebook isn’t going to be deterred because they might get reported (and then... presumably nothing?) for sending an emoji. No matter Facebook’s end goal, it seems like an odd strategy.
- mic47 7y ago" Someone who wants to sexually harass a person via Facebook isn’t going to be deterred because they might get reported (and then... presumably nothing?) for sending an emoji." No, but person reviewing such reported content now have in their guideline that emojis count too and know what to do.
- maxaf 7y ago> If Facebook really wanted to stop this they could make the eggplant less phallic looking or remove it entirely. I for one am still waiting with bated breath for the "eggplant parm" emoji.
- dopamean 7y agoZuckerberg is a clown.
- sschueller 7y agoWhy not also ban the gun emoji? Oh wait this is an American company where violence is OK but sex is taboo.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoThey changed it to a water pistol, but this is the Internet where we have to be outraged anyway.
- slig 7y agoHave you seen the gun emoji recently?
- Lammy 7y agoAlready (kinda?) happened. A few years ago FB and Apple and Google and all the other major platform companies “nerfed” the gun emoji by reworking its appearance from a drawing of a realistic gun into a drawing of a water gun.
- brandonmenc 7y agoYet they still sell games where you shoot people and movies depicting horrific graphic violence. Murder simulators? Yay! Violence on film? Wow, awesome! A drawing of a gun? WOAH HOLD ON WAIT A MINUTE Makes nothing but sense.
- geddy 7y agoYeah let's pretend guns don't exist. Knives exist too, those are weapons, better ban them. You could throw apples at someone for long enough and probably hurt them a good bit, better ban them too. The sterilized world you want to live in is not necessarily the one that everyone else wants to live in.
- pushpop 7y agoApples aren’t specifically designed to kill people. You don’t have mass school shootings where dozens of kids are attacked by apples and suicides caused by apples are significantly fewer than those by guns. The two aren’t even remotely equatable.
- Johnny555 7y agoHow will they even police this? If I say "Hey come over for dinner tonight :eggplant:", is that sexual innuendo or am I making my famous eggplant parmigiana?
- monocasa 7y agoCapriciously and arbitrarily like all their other rules.
- emptybits 7y ago"Sounds good! :peach:" I'll bring my famous peach cobbler for dessert. If you know what I mean. Actually, I don't know what I mean so I'm sure Facebook can't either. But that won't stop them. Facebook users play in Facebook's house for "free", so they live by the owner's rules which can change on a whim.
- jschwartzi 7y agoGuess I can't make my peach baba ghanoush anymore.
- klyrs 7y agoThis isn't how I was expecting to be offended on HN today.
- knolax 7y agoSeems very contradictory given that Instagram is 50% bikini photos.
- draw_down 7y agoMadness.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoThere goes any argument that Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to uphold the “ideal of free speech”.
- wwweston 7y agoCertainly not Free Peach AMIRITE?
- _eqet 7y agoPolitical ads to influence elections with money that have global impacts on the entire world are fine, vegetable emojis... not acceptable!
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- J5892 7y agofruit emojis
- dannykwells 7y agoRight because sexual innuendo is worse than untruthful political ads.
- qnsi 7y agothis is everyone's reaction to this, and why this article is gaining traction on HN
- giarc 7y agoBut it's true. It seems like this policy change would prevent a consenting couple from "flirting" over Facebook by using emoji's but would allow a politican to create false content for an ad.
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- jackcodes 7y agoThe United States of America
- kps 7y agoIt's fine as long as they don't ban ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs like U+130BA.
- frant-hartm 7y agoPure gold. Keeping that one.
- pattisapu 7y agoYou gotta fight for your right to arty.
- murkle 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18346922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18346922
- kangnkodos 7y agoI guess "an implicit or indirect ask for nude imagery, sex or sexual partners, or sex chat conversations" is OK without an eggplant emoji. But if you add an eggplant emoji... that's it! You crossed the line. Facebook cannot tolerate that. Oh no. Not that.
- ryanmercer 7y agoCan't use eggplant emoji sexually, can post completely topless photo/video breastfeeding as a woman, can not post completely topless photo/video as a woman, sexually suggestive cartoon still images are arbitrarily allowed/removed, sexually suggestive art or art depicting nudity you made is often removed unless the genitals and female nipples are covered (including tattoos that depict nudity), sexually explicit art from a world famous artist like a famous painting or sculpture is fine... In a former life I've even seen but I've seen friends' burlesque posters/flyers with cartoon nudity be removed if they don't have pasties drawn on nipples or the nipples airbrushed (yet throw a baroque painting with far more detail/realism up and it's ok) out and numerous performers that have had actual photographs of them removed even when they DID have pasties on. Seriously, women wearing amply sized pasties has been a no-go "violating community standards" but you could post something like Reubens' The Judgement of Paris and that's fine because it's a 17th century painting worth mind boggling amounts of money and is tasteful art. Facebook reaaalllly needs to get consistent with what they do or do not allow.
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- cityzen 7y agoPolitical ads? Sure! Eggplant meaning wiener? NO WAY! Mark is way to pure for that kind of stuff. He is busy saving free speech with political ads! Zuck is quite the eggplant head.
- sergiomattei 7y agoThe conversation in this thread is incredibly toxic and unhelpful, almost Reddit-like. @dang?
- coldtea 7y agoMakes sense. FB and Instagram reflect the sensitivities towards sexuality of its host country's culture.
- GaryNumanVevo 7y agoEmoji use is just the latest step in the "Language Game", Facebook seems to be quite reactionary these days.
- o09rdk 7y agoI think we've reached some singularity with regard to the obviousness of the futility of large scale content moderation on social media.
- Gibbon1 7y agoWe can't talk about sex on the internet but we can still have civilized and gentile conversations about the need for genocide.
- vchak1 7y agoAllowing eggplants and peaches to find each other easily was why thefacebook spread around college campuses.
- meed 7y agoYes to alt-right propaganda, no to boobs. Sounds about right.