First emoji blocked on Instagram

In April 2015, Katie Notopoulos at online media company Buzzfeed noticed that searching on Instagram for the eggplant (aubergine) emoji produced zero hits. A subsequent investigation revealed that Instagram had intentionally blocked the emoji because of its use as a metaphor for male genitalia, which the social networking site described as content that violates its community guidelines. This makes the eggplant the first ever emoji to be blocked on the social-networking and media-sharing site.

Instagram had only just made it possible to search comments for particular emojis when they enforced the block. However, their list of unblocked emojis still includes bananas, melons and peaches – not to mention guns, knives, bombs, cigarettes, syringes and pills.