Facebook Removes ‘Feeling Fat’ and ‘Feeling Ugly’ Emojis

Social media reacted aggressively when Facebook added a new list of emojis including a ‘feeling fat’ emoji. Now, Facebook has done the right thing by removing the emojis.

Facebook has finally done it. The company has removed the ‘feeling fat’ emoji, after thousands of women singed a petition on Change.org, arguing that it promoted body-shaming. Facebook had an option to use ‘feelings’ as emojis. And, one of those feelings included a feeling fat emoji. As soon as people saw the emoji, they signed the viral petition to remove the option. Over 26,000 people have signed the petition.

The petition was set up by Catherine Weingarten. She wrote on the petition page that fat is not a feeling. Fat is just a natural part of our bodies no matter what our weight. She also said that all bodies deserve to be respected and cared for.

She said that when Facebook users are setting their status to feeling fat, then that is offensive to people who consider themselves overweight. This might also include people that have eating disorders and that is not right. There was another petition which wanted the ‘feeling ugly’ option to be removed.

Rebecca Guzelian began this petition with Endangered Bodies and she said that how can a person feel fat or ugly when these aren’t actually feelings. She said that fat and ugly are adjectives and they describe physical characteristic and not feelings.

She also said that these adjectives are used by our society to make women feel negative about their bodies. She said that her biggest concern with normalizing this kind of language is the effect it eventually might have on the younger minds.

Facebook released a statement last night which said that they’ve heard the community that the ‘feeling fat’ as an option for status updates could reinforce negative body image particularly for people with eating disorder. So this is why they will be removing the feeling fat option from the list. But, it is to be noted that Facebook has still not addressed the feeling ugly emoji.