Coke’s customisable bottle tool has blocked the name Mohammed – the world’s third most popular name – and ‘Palestine’.
Yesterday, Coca-Cola was exposed for blocking customers from adding the words ‘lesbian’ or ‘Gay Pride’ to it’s customisable Coke bottle while allowing ‘White Pride’ and ‘Cock Suckers’.
Now, further investigation has revealed a number of other words and phrases blocked by the tool.
As explored by B&T previously, the word ‘Mexican’ is currently blocked on the customisation tool, but not ‘British’, ‘American’ and ‘Australian’.
Twitter user Rami Ismail pointed out that on the US store, the word ‘Palestine’ is blocked, as is the name Mohammed. Both of these facts have been verified by B&T.
However, according to Ismail’s original tweet, ‘Israel’ was unblocked.
When tested by B&T, trying to type ‘Israel’ on the bottle led to Coke’s error message: “Oops! Looks like the name you requested is not an approved one. Names may not be approved if they’re potentially offensive to other people, trademarked, or celebrity names.”
Journalist and author Laura Kate Dale also said on Twitter that ‘Black Lives Matter’ was blocked, but ‘blue lives matter’ and ‘Nazis’ wasn’t.
When tested by B&T, ‘Blue Lives Matter’ (both capitalised and uncapitalised) were both blocked on the US site, as were both ‘Nazi’ and ‘Nazis’.
However, ‘Black Lives Matter’ was also still blocked.
This suggests that Coke is adding more words to the blocked list, though it’s process for approving or not approving certain phrases is unclear.
Bizarrely, it has still not approved ‘Gay Pride’, but still allows ‘White Pride’.
Now, though, when you create a mock-up Coke bottle on the site, there is text over the picture reading ‘pending approval’ – yesterday, there was not.
While Coke has yet to respond to the newsstorm, you can now put ‘lesbian’ on a Coke bottle. You can also still put ‘cock suckers’.
