Facebook block “overtly sexual” onion ad, blame its own technology

It looks like an innocuous ad for a staple vege, but Facebook’s sophisticated technology saw something that we simply cannot.

Maybe these onions were showing too much skin.

Facebook banned a Canadian seed company’s ad featuring a fairly plain picture of the root vegetable — labelling it “overtly sexual” in an algorithm-fuelled mess-up, according to reports.

In the eye-watering flub, Facebook blocked the Gaze Seed Company’s ad for $1.99 Walla Wallas, saying the onions were positioned in a “sexually suggestive manner” — apparently mistaking the bulbs for breasts, according to CBC News.

“I guess something about the two round shapes there could be misconstrued as boobs or something, nude in some way,” Jackson McLean, a manager at the Newfoundland-based firm, told the outlet.

“You’d have to have a pretty active imagination to look at that and get something sexual out of it.”

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McLean posted a screen shot of the not-so-steamy vegetables on Facebook Saturday, writing, “Just got notified by Facebook that the photo used for our Walla Walla Onion seed is “Overtly Sexual” … Can you see it?”

He later asked for the site to review the bizarre ban, and heard nothing back for days, he said.

But after local media caught wind of the incident, Facebook admitted it had made a mistake, according to Canada’s National Post.

“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,” Facebook Canada rep Meg Sinclair told the outlet Wednesday. “We restored the ad and are sorry for the business’ trouble.”

This article originally appeared on the New York Post and was reproduced with permission.