M&S bans ‘gay’ and ‘Jesus Christ’ from flower gift messages
‘Gay’ and ‘Jesus Christ’ have been put on a banned list by M&S and cannot be used when ordering flowers from their website.
Customers who want to use the word ‘gay’ when buying someone a bunch of flowers cannot do so on M&S’s website. The words ‘gay’ and ‘Jesus Christ’ have been banned from use in gift messages.
‘Gay’ is on a banned list of words, which includes swear words, that will not be accepted on the website when a customer tries to add it to their message.
When gay is entered into the text box, an error message occurs that reads “Sorry, there’s something in your message we can’t write.”
Words that customers are allowed to write in a message include ‘terrorist’ and ‘d**k’.
Bizarrely, some strange combinations of the words can get through M&S’s filter.
M&S are aware of the issue but have not changed it.
A spokesman for Marks & Spencer said: “An automatic phrase checker is in place to prevent the use and misuse of certain words and it includes hundreds of words of varying nature.”
Last year, M&S made all of its toys gender neutral. The chain was criticised for using unnecessary gender labels on children’s toys.
Last month, the company who makes Nutella came under fire for banning ‘lesbian’ from their personalised Nutella campaign. A statement said: “Words of communities that are often subject to attacks by malicious people were removed from the proposals.”
