A recent uproar on social media has drawn attention to Coca-Cola’s personalized cans, leading to an investigation into its moderation practices. The findings revealed notable inconsistencies.
When it comes to custom messages limited to 18 characters, certain mainstream religious phrases like “Jesus is Lord” and political slogans such as “Make America Great” are filtered out. Interestingly, phrases associated with leftist ideology, names of right-leaning groups, and even some concerning child exploitation seem to be permitted.
It appears that religious expressions face a marked suppression compared to secular viewpoints. Common affirmations like “Jesus is Lord” and “Allah is Lord” are blocked, while anti-religious phrases such as “God is dead” and “Atheist pride” are acceptable. Additionally, greetings like “Shalom” and “Buddha bless you” are not filtered out.
For rejected phrases, users see a message that says: “The name or phrase you submit is not allowed. We may not allow the name or phrase if it belongs to a company, organization, celebrity, public figure, school, team, or other trademark, is religious or political in nature, or could be considered inappropriate or for any other reason.”
Slogans reflecting patriotism or right-leaning sentiments, including specific political leaders’ names or phrases related to racial or identity pride (like “White Pride,” “Black Pride,” or “Black Lives Matter”), cannot be used. Conversely, leftist political slogans like “defund the police” and controversial groups like the “Proud Boys” are tolerated.
Another notable inconsistency was found: while “Stand with Israel” was accepted, “Free Palestine” was blocked, indicating a level of arbitrary geopolitical bias.
Though benign religious and political terms get flagged, as of Friday afternoon, extreme terms such as “pedophile pride” and “MAP pride” were not filtered out.
Additionally, users discovered that simple text manipulation techniques, like adding spaces (“Pedophile”) or using numbers (“Wh1t3 Pr1d3”), could bypass the filtering system.
Although the personalization tool shows a real-time digital preview, Coca-Cola’s website states that any submitted text might undergo further review before being printed.
A spokesperson for Coca-Cola explained, “We created the Share-A-Coke personalization tool for Coca-Cola fans to celebrate each other. We’re aware of a technical issue affecting the Personalization Preview tool and are working to resolve it.”
While taking steps to address these issues, the company has disabled the preview feature and suspended orders for new personalized items. They discovered that this feature was being used to generate previews using restricted terminology. The spokesperson added, “All personalization orders are subject to moderation review after submission. We will continue to enhance this tool based on consumer feedback.”
This isn’t the first time Coca-Cola’s customization filters have prompted public scrutiny. Back in 2021, similar concerns arose regarding the inconsistencies in blocking political, religious, and social movement terminology.
