GRIS, the indie adventure platformer released last month, is apparently having a little bit of difficulty with Facebook. According to a Tweet by Devolver Digital, the game’s publisher, a recent pending Facebook ad featuring the game’s launch trailer was rejected due to a ‘sexually suggestive’ scene. The scene in question comes at 0:40 seconds into the launch trailer, where the statue crumbles as the protagonist climbs over.
Devolver Digital spoke to Kotaku about the ad rejection. The unnamed representative of Devolver says, “this is stupid,” referring to the content flagged for rejection of the ad. Devolver went through the standard Facebook appeal process as well but was rejected yet again. “We appealed and they said the appeal was rejected based on the grounds that Facebook does not allow nudity.” They go on to speak of the ridiculousness of the claim; aside from the fact that there is no nudity at all in the scene, the figure that Facebook claims to be nude is a statue. By that logic, Facebook should not allow photos of the Statue of David or the Venus de Milo, as both statues depict nudity, or as Facebook would put it, ‘sexually suggestive’ content.
While it’s naive to think that a human sifts through all content posted to Facebook to flag for inappropriate content, which could be excused as human error, there’s really no excuse for an advanced algorithm that mass-checks the content. Seems like the algorithm could use a little work still, and it may be worth getting a human to watch the trailer before a final decision is made as to whether or not the content contains nudity and warrants exclusion from the social media site. You can check out the launch trailer for yourself below to see if you can spot the questionable content, because it seems like Facebook was the only one able to notice it.
GRIS is available now on MacOS and PC through Steam, and the Nintendo Switch.