Thu 15 Sep 2016 In: Our Communities View at Wayback View at NDHA
Sexting is the talk of the town and the way so many of us are communicating our interest in someone else. Sexting using emojis is a fast and fun way to play around with it, leaving a little to the imagination (unless you’re super creative). The only problem is, there’s no little cute emoji to help you out when you want to make sure you’re on the same wave length with your potential partner and keen to wrap a condom on your eggplant. Unicode is the company that gets to decide just what emojis are available for you to use on your devices and they recently rejected an application for a condom emoji, saying that tech giants such as Facebook and Google did not support it. The tech giants seem to think that emojis such as a little hand gun are far more acceptable. The New Zealand AIDS Foundation were among the organisations calling for a condom emoji to be added to the mix and Executive Director Jason Myers says “HIV is on the rise in New Zealand and talking about safe sex is more important now than ever before. Young people’s attitudes toward safe sex are being influenced by what they are experiencing online and it needs to be addressed. The lack of support from these tech giants is making our work harder than it needs to be.” He says “It frustrates me that these companies find a gun emoji acceptable, but not a condom emoji. The recent rejection of the condom emoji comes after Google shutting down NZAF’s advertising account because they don’t consider condom promotion family friendly and Facebook frequently disapproves our condom and HIV testing ads because they feature adult products. This stops an important message from reaching people and it can have serious implications for their health.” The NZAF have launched an online petition and are calling on you to show your support for the condom emoji in the hopes to put pressure on the tech giants to do the right thing and show their support for safe-sex. Sign the petition here. - 15th September 2016