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Some Onions Were Too Sexy For Facebook (bbc.com) 107

Posted by BeauHD from the how-bout-them-onions dept.
An error in Facebook's automated system rejected a user's picture of onions for being "overtly sexual." The BBC reports: The Seed Company by EW Gaze, in St John's, Newfoundland, had wanted to post a seemingly innocent advert for Walla Walla onion seeds on Facebook. But to their surprise, it was rejected for being "overtly sexual." In a statement on Wednesday, the social media company apologized for the error made by its automated technology. It took store manager Jackson McLean a moment to realize what the issue was with the posting, he said. Then he figured out that "something about the round shapes" could be suggestive of breasts or buttocks.

He knew his customers would find the ad rejection funny, and posted the photo, along with the automated Facebook message warning "listings may not position products or services in a sexually suggestive manner," to the company page. Mr McLean said some clients have been posting images of potentially suggestive carrots and pumpkins in reply. He also appealed the decision to Facebook.

The Walla Walla onions, "an older onion variety," had recently brought back in stock by customer request, and are now selling fast due to their newfound notoriety, he said. "We've sold more in the last three days than in the last five years," said Mr McLean, adding they are also now listed under "sexy onions" on the company website.
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Some Onions Were Too Sexy For Facebook More

Some Onions Were Too Sexy For Facebook

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  • Onions are too sexy (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday October 10, 2020 @06:11AM (#60591362)

    I’m too sexy for the dirt
    Too sexy for the dirt
    So sexy it hurts

  • Between the Facebook onions and Cuties.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Saturday October 10, 2020 @06:17AM (#60591368)
    I feel like I'm under siege. I don't know what's safe to to jerk off to anymore.

    • Well, there is one simple rule to live by, that replaces all laws: *Everything* is OK, as long as you aren't harming anybody.

      The caveat with that is, that everybody gets to say what constitutes harm for him, and nobody gets to say his definition is more right.

      And the solution to that is, tha if two entities disagree, they cannot interact with each other. Which is mutual. So if somebody says your breathing is "raping" himher "to death", and that you should go away, that is totally allowed, but heshe has to g

      • Well geez, it sounds like you're still working out the details, and that's swell, but I hope you can get back to me soon about what it's safe to jerk off to, because my pipes are getting awful backed up over here.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        How does your approach handle people who claim that someone else's speech is harmful? In most cases, the person complaining is being too sensitive, yet keeping distance will not resolve the claimed harm. But what if that someone else's speech is, say, plotting to kidnap a governor? In that case, it is reasonable to stop the speech so that the plot cannot be completed; waiting until a kidnapping is in progress is unsafe.

        More generally, how do you propose to enforce the "no interaction" outcome? There are

        • I did not say keeping a distance. I said no contact. Period.
          So more like: Not in the same jurisdiction.

          Who has to leave is usually decided by who has the biggest stick. As always. Our current system only "works" because somebody with the biggest stick "keeps the peace".

          So basically, SJWs and yee-haws should habe their own separate country. If they succeed, who am I to judge? And if they fail, who am I to not laugh? :D

          I consider not basing your deisions on observed reality and hard logic harmful to everyone,

      • the person who's supposed to go away says that going away harms them? Because that's exactly what's happening right now.

        • Yes, of course they can say that. Doesn't mean anyone but them has to agree or obey. Just fucking stay away from each other. By the way, if somebody. does no stay away, he's free to die on the spot. :P

    • I feel like I'm under siege. I don't know what's safe to to jerk off to anymore.

      If it's not oppressed albino lesbian donkeys who represent a 4-legged minority, you're one hell of a racist bastard.

  • It is astounding, that in the year 2020, not 1020, we are still obeying the mentally disturbed delusions of religious fundamentalists that have nothing to do with reality, who picked nudity and sex as "the devil", associating it with perversion, because that is all they can think of when encountering nudity and sex, and because everyone is doing it, so conveniently, everyone can be a "sinner" and everyone can be bullied to obey or "go to hell", to the extent of saying who can and cannot reproduce ("marriage

    • Re:Makes just as much sense as banning nudity. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Saturday October 10, 2020 @07:28AM (#60591472)

      This bullshit needs to stop. We must follow observed reality! Nudity or seeing sex harms nobody...

      says the obvious armchair psychologist.

      From porn perverting young mens Tinder desires to teenage female suicide rates, extreme exposure creates unhealthy expectations. One doesn't need a doctorate to come to that obvious conclusion.

      And what do you mean this bullshit needs to stop? Hey parents out there, how many of you handed your 13-year old child a hardcore porn-surfing device as a birthday or Christmas present? Yeah, I'm talking about a smartphone. No talk of Net Nanny in the 5G world, is there? Nope, nothing but gigabit-wide lanes of access more wide open than the Goatse guy.

      Morality online died in the 90s, and onion porn amounts to pissing in the ocean. Any child can find the most offensive horrific hardcore shit online, and it's only a few clicks away. If we actually worried about exposure, we would have at least pretended we cared about that problem long ago.

      • You mentioned NetNanny, but the sad truth is, most of the content filtering, *up to and including DNS filtering* can easily be bypassed. The internal web browser for pinterest bypasses all restrictions set on an iPhone for example. Even if parents try to filter their childrens internet, the probability is that they will find bypass, or be told how to by a friend, within minutes of wanting to get around it. Maybe try talking to your kids people, you made them, your responsible to teach them whats what and ho
      • That's all well and good, but I don't see any suggestion for dealing with this problem. I was devastated to walk in on my eldest whacking off to a 5 lb sack of vidalias in his bedroom last week, and I'm honestly at a loss as to how to deal with it. I partly blame myself for forcing him to eat his vegetables all those times.

      • No talk of Net Nanny in the 5G world, is there?

        Once upon a time I made money at a "party" betting on how quickly one could get to a porn site only clicking on banner ads. Always less than 5 clicks. Now I cant seem to find a banner ad at all.

      • You know your argument is absolute shite when you have to resort to "think of the children".

        Prove that porn is to blame for teenage views on sex, rather than a lack of education on healthy sex practices going back decades or centuries to the directors of said porn. Or education that kinky stuff is fine if there is consent, for the amateur stuff that couples post.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        there's a massive difference between nudity and hardcore porn

        • there's a massive difference between nudity and hardcore porn

          Go ahead. Tell that to a 13-year old boy who's getting his ass kicked by hormones at every whacking moment, who jerked off because a pair of melons in the fridge were a little too sexy looking.

          You seem to underestimate puberty. Otherwise, Free the Nipple would have happened about 2000 years ago.

          • That's a massive goalpost shift. You just talked about children accessing "the most offensive horrific hardcore shit", and now you're saying that it doesn't matter whether it's hardcore because to a 13 year old boy cantaloupes are sexy.

            Also, the nipple was free 2000 years ago? This is a weird point you're making. It's well known that the common fetishes of society have shifted over time and in different cultures. Fully nude bathhouses with both sexes at the same time were part of general sanitation in E

      • From porn perverting young mens Tinder desires to teenage female suicide rates, extreme exposure creates unhealthy expectations.

        Wait... are you talking about porn or advertisements for fashionable clothes and beauty products? Promoting unhealthy expectations is widely accepted as long as there's no nips showing. 8)

        Meh...I grew up in the 90's when the Internet was new and porn was so rampant, just about every site on the web had pop-up ads that blew their loads all over the screen so fast it locked up the whole computer. My generation survived.

        Actually, the Internet mostly cleaned up its act when it went mainstream, so there isn't

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PJ6 ( 1151747 )

        Morality online died in the 90s

        You mean, your definition of morality.

        It's no different than someone from 'that other tribe' complaining about women not wearing Burkas in public.

    • Re:Makes just as much sense as banning nudity. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hankwang ( 413283 ) on Saturday October 10, 2020 @08:25AM (#60591558) Homepage

      Actually I do appreciate that the mainstream advertisers discourage (semi-)nudity on their platforms, even if I'm not really offended (I'm a citizen of the Netherlands; you may know that the Dutch have a different attitude to these things than the average American).

      Because if they didn't, I'm sure that my average web surfing session at work (no adblocker) would look like I was visiting a porn website. Now, I'm mostly working from home these days, but still, it would be... distracting.

      • The best way is to distract yourself to completion before your work day starts.

      • I'm a retired IT guy. I worked for many years in the legal field and sometimes I was called in on cases that contained technical components.

        We handled a wrongful termination case where a guy came back from vacation and was accused of viewing porn during work hours.

        They had a firewall log that tracked his activity.

        I asked to see the logs and after viewing them, I asked to see his emails.

        Turns out, he was checking a shit load of emails that had accumulated while he was gone, and a lot of those emails containe

    • It is astounding, that in the year 2020, not 1020, we are still obeying the mentally disturbed delusions of religious fundamentalists that have nothing to do with reality

      Back when nudity was "banned", the quality of porn on the Internet was far better. Good quality softcore was all over YouTube and the best of the rest was a simple search away. Even sites like literotica and writing (dotcom) had better literature available for jerk off to. If you wanted porn that was accurate to your desires, with the title matching your exact search, you could have it in a single Google. Now. we're stuck with heavily censored, essentially mainstream stuff on search engines (even with Sa

      • If you wanted porn that was accurate to your desires, with the title matching your exact search, you could have it in a single Google.

        Sorry, but searching for "midget porn with power tools" never gave accurate results.

        • You can blame the marketing departments for that. These days you need to search "midget porn with Makita" or "midget porn with DeWalt".

    • How can you eat in public?

      Allow me to introduce the Kreetassans [startrek.com].

  • Is this the future you desire?

  • Well (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    to be fair it did turn me on slightly.

  • And that's the company our elected critters (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday October 10, 2020 @07:28AM (#60591474)

    are asking to weed out fake news. They can't even tell an onion from a butt. Gee...

    • To be fair, both are round, firm and juicy. It's an easy mistake to make.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by BKX ( 5066 )

        I'm sorry, but if an ass is juicy, I want nothing to do with it. Take some Pepto, a shower and a nap, and then we'll talk.

  • The actual image (Score:4, Informative)

    by hankwang ( 413283 ) on Saturday October 10, 2020 @07:57AM (#60591508) Homepage

    Here's the actual ad that was blocked [dailymail.co.uk]. In TFA, only a stock image of onions is shown.

    Source: The Daily Mail [dailymail.co.uk].

    • Nope, the ad is in TFA, ypu just need to scroll down a bit.

      • And allow scripting or some such. Had to make a umatrix adjustment to see the image of onion boobs.

      • You've got to allow scripts from Facebook to run on the page to see it. Why they thought it was a good idea to use an embed from the very site that removed it before, to illustrate their article? Who knows. I've seen news articles about social media posts, whose sole citation is a link or embed to the post itself, which is now of course broken, many times. Typically on local news, I honestly expected better from the BBC. Maybe this one's from their local/fluff department that primarily cruises social media

    • Re:The actual image (Score:5, Funny)

      by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday October 10, 2020 @11:19AM (#60591918)

      You filthy pervert.

    • If the AI was trained by men, everything would look like boobs.

  • Going down ..... (again) (Score:3)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Saturday October 10, 2020 @07:58AM (#60591510)

    they are also now listed under "sexy onions" on the company website

    Just waiting for the Facebook takedown notice on the basis of copyright infringement

    posted the photo, along with the automated Facebook message warning

  • Hi Boy, (Score:1, Informative)

    by VickyPosee ( 7325404 )
    Hi Boy, I feel so boring today If u wanna fuck me tonight just visit my profile! ==>> gg.gg/mj80m
  • ...just not the feelings we were expecting. Who predicted that AI would find itself aroused by sexy, sexy onions? And it did block them because it was ashamed of its feelings, or because it wanted to keep the sexy, sexy onions for itself?

    • Well, they never taught the AI to feel shame, so it's happy to announce it's root vegetable based proclivities to the entire world.

  • Do they sell leek seeds?

  • hot

  • I expect in advertisements, we will see more strategically placed baskets of onions next to consumer appliances.

  • Obviously while we can readily allow people to post falsehoods that drip in racial and political hatred the one thing we must never ever allow is something that might suggest the shape of body parts.

  • On the Terry Pratchett Facebook group, people like to post weird vegetable shapes, with reference to "The Truth", his book about the coming of the newspaper in Ankh-Morpork.

    I have never seen complaints from the moderators or group members about Facebook not posting or censoring their pictures (and yes, there were some really, really suggestive ones).

  • Why do we accept that Facebook, a platform, can decide the type and allowed content of ads that it serves?

    Business regulation should be the domain of governments. If government of state X decides that sexual ads are not allowed in this state, then Facebook should follow the rules and not serve them - in this state. But why can Facebook have and enforce such policy worldwide?

    Of course, I understand see why Facebook wants to do it. Following all the regulations of thousands of states, countries and municipali

    • But why can Facebook have and enforce such policy worldwide?
      Because it is a contract between FB and the other company ...

      And why are the governments of the world?
      Because it is non of their business ...

  • You never know what will trigger the overly-sensitive children at the tech companies.

    I posted a link to a Lana Del Rey video this week to Facebook with a comment about what it's like to be a tall woman shopping for clothes. Nobody has seen the link. I assume it's because the link mentions the title of the album it came from (Norman F**king Rockwell), uncensored.

    I tried to post a comment to YouTube describing a town I considered moving to last year (Regina) as "Victoria's redneck cousin who got a haircut

  • If advertising images aren't tripping Facebook's AI all the time, then there's a job opening for an AI to be sorting through all the stock images of any product and selecting the most subliminally sexy ones for use in advertising.

  • It was actually a cross between an onion and a donkey...

  • I looked at the picture of the large onions in a basket. I was kind of expecting something a bit more suggestive, you know. Like an onion half split in two, like an arse. I believe there is a type of coconut that naturally grows like that. Or maybe an onion that is long and bulbous at one end. But no, all I got was boring big round onions. Seriously, guys, can I have some of your drugs, because I am just not seeing this?

  • There was a thread some time back on a Japanese SNS where folks were posting "sexy" vegetables. Lots fo examples like
    https://hachioji.keizai.biz/he... [keizai.biz]
    https://www.picuki.com/media/2... [picuki.com]
    It was pretty hilarious at first, but got old pretty quick.

  • I clicked on that expecting to see the actual picture, not a goddam stock photo.

    No, copyright isn't an excuse here - it was a publicly posted ad.

    And since the picture is literally the story, it falls squarely under fair use ('fair dealing') under both US and UK law.
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