Instagram and Facebook are now banning naughty vegetables and fruits!
People who pair a peach and eggplant or aubergine emoji may be representing sexual activity and can be removed from Instagram or Facebook, according to new guidelines.
The tech giants updated the Community Standards language about permissible sexual expressions on the platforms in July.
Under the new terms, pairing a peach or eggplant emoji with other expressions of what out.com deems ‘being horny’ will be qualified as ‘sexual solicitation.’
Using the emojis can get an account removed or flagged.
“Content must meet Criteria 1 (offer or ask) and be implicitly or indirectly offering or asking for sexual solicitation in order to be deemed violating,” Facebook noted.
“For example, if content is a hand-drawn image depicting sexual activity but does not ask or offer sexual solicitation, it is not violating.”
It was BBC journalist Thomas Fabbri who discovered new rules when he was researching about social media bans.
Instagram told The Post: “[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.”
The new ban also includes using emojis to cover nipples, butts or genitalia.
There are now two criteria used for defining sexual solicitation. First, a user must indirectly or implicitly offer some form of sexual communication, be it ‘sex chat conversations,’ sex, or ‘nude imagery.’ The content must also have some form of ‘sexually suggestive elements’ such as emoji strings and contextually specific.
A spokesperson for Facebook told the Daily Dot that the rules added had already been implemented. “We often make updates to our Community Standards. We publish these changes on our Community Standards site so our community is aware.
“With this update, nothing changed in terms of the policy itself or how we enforce it, we simply updated the language to make it clearer for our community.”
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Replaced!