Too Sexy! Facebook’s AI Mistakes Ad for Onions As Nude Content, Blocks for Being ‘Overtly Sexual’

Are onions naked or clothed in their natural form? Facebook's Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be having an issue telling the difference between pictures with sexual connotations referring to the human body and vegetables that are just round in shape. A garden centre in Newfoundland, Canada on Monday received a notice from Facebook about an ad they had uploaded for Walla Walla onion seeds which had photos of some onions. Facebook's notice said the ad broke its rules on "products with overtly sexual positioning," clarifying: "listings may not position products or services in a sexually suggestive manner." Facebook Bans Nudity? Social Media Removes Flemish Paintings by Rubens For Nude Content.

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The Seed Company by E.W. Gaze shared pictures of the onions with the caption, "So we just got notified by Facebook that the photo used for our Walla Walla Onion seed is 'Overtly Sexual' and therefore cannot be advertised to be sold on their platform...Can you see it?" CBC News quoted Jackson McLean, a manager at the Newfoundland-based firm as saying, "I guess something about the two round shapes there could be misconstrued as boobs or something, nude in some way. You’d have to have a pretty active imagination to look at that and get something sexual out of it." He later asked for the site to review the ban, and did not get a reply from him.

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Meg Sinclair, Facebook Canada's head of communications told CBC, "We use automated technology to keep nudity off our apps. But sometimes it doesn't know a walla walla onion from a, well, you know. We restored the ad and are sorry for the business' trouble." In the past too, Facebook's automated systems have removed similar content only to be reinstated by human moderators. In 2018, they had taken down a post containing excerpts from the Declaration of Independence after it flagged a post containing hate speech.