Nutella France message on a jar campaign spreads anger with ‘lesbian’, ‘Jew’, 'Muslim' and 'Christian' word ban
Nutella France has come under fire for banning a list of words including 'lesbian' and several world religions on an online app giving users the opportunity to personalise jars with a message for loved ones.
The 'Say it with Nutella' marketing campaign, which enables cholcolate enthusiasts to share Nutella jar messages on social media, sparked criticism after it was found to be restrict certain keywords words on the site.
The Independent reports that the site which purports to enable users to "create custom messages and share them with those you love" has banned a number of religious and gay group keywords from the service.
Despite alluding to allow users to let users share their messages, the site algorithm blacklisted a host of words which could be negatively associated with the brand including 'Hitler’, ‘smoking’, ‘monster’, ‘genocide’, ‘massacre’ and more.
Tout ce que vous avez toujours voulu dire, dites-le avec Nutella ! #DitesLeAvecNutella http://t.co/1gBC2HkU1V pic.twitter.com/QDoBg4yp3k
— Nutella France (@NutellaFR) February 23, 2015
On its decision to blacklist certain words, Ferrero, the company which produces Nutella, said: “The negative or insulting messages were directly removed from the field of possibilities, the idea being to use the jar of Nutella as a communication medium to share enthusiasm.
“Similarly, words of communities that are often subject to attacks by malicious people were removed from the proposals.”
This comes after the brand last month positioned itself as the perfect spread for Shrove Tuesday with a mouth-watering TV advert.