Facebook and Instagram have banned the use of sexual emojis in an effort to curb sexual solicitation on the platforms.
Facebook’s new community standards (which also cover Instagram) went into effect in September, according to the New York Post.
Users will no longer be able to pair an eggplant or peach emoji, which qualifies as “Sexual Solicitation.” A violation of the terms can get a user’s account flagged or removed, according to the adult industry news site XBIZ.
“[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,” Instagram tells The Post.
A Facebook company statement to XBIZ said “We often make updates to our Community Standards. We publish these changes on our Community Standards site so our community is aware.”
Kanye West should be thrilled by the new standards, as he recently noted that social media makes men suffer “like Jesus.”
“I suffer – and I appreciate the suffering because we can just feel a little bit of what Jesus felt when we suffer, but social media makes me suffer,” West said in the new interview on Beats1 on Apple Music.
“I suffer from that and by me saying this out loud, I’m sure there’s other married men that suffer in a similar way that are happy to hear me say, ‘Oh ya, I’m suffering.”
Via Newsweek:
To violate the policy, a user’s post must meet two criteria: it has to contain an “offer or ask” [ie. asking for sex, asking for nudes or asking for explicit chats] alongside “suggestive elements,” including “contextually specific and commonly sexual emoji or emoji strings.”
Suggestive elements also includes “imagery of real individuals with nudity covered by human parts, objects or digital obstruction, including long shots of fully nude bottoms” and “mentions or depictions of sexual activity such as: sexual roles, sex positions, fetish scenarios, state of arousal, act of sexual intercourse or activity (sexual penetration or self-pleasuring).”
Daily Mail has a breakdown of the new Facebook guidelines, read here.
