Nintendo Fan Account Flagged On Twitter For Image Of Man Putting On Princess Peach Mask

The excellent Supper Mario Broth – a blog dedicated to weird and fun tidbits of Nintendo history – has had its Twitter account flagged as “sensitive” after it posted an image of … an actor putting on a giant Princess Peach mask.

Here’s the tweet in question:

Below is a screenshot of the Tweet that mistakenly got this account flagged as containing sensitive content. As you can see, this was an error. I would never post actual sensitive content. This Tweet will be pinned until the situation is resolved. pic.twitter.com/nMnElZF9uj

— Supper Mario Broth (@MarioBrothBlog) March 31, 2018

Note that the original image as it was first tweeted was in colour:

The image is a still from this excellent YouTube video by KCLcreations, a costume and mascot design company that has worked with Nintendo a number of times.

It’s a collection of behind the scenes footage and photographs from a commercial shoot, for 2005’s Mario Superstar Baseball:

So the actual image is of an actor putting on a mask for a TV commercial. Yet Twitter’s algorithms, designed to catch offensive imagery without the need for human intervention, have decided that it’s something naughty.

Supper Mario Broth has tested posting the same image to dummy accounts and had the same issue: within ten seconds, the account is flagged as containing sensitive material.

While this doesn’t lock the account, it does mean that any new visitors to Supper Mario Broth’s page/feed don’t get to see any tweets until they click this ominous warning:

Here’s what the page should look like (or does once you click that button):

While you could chalk this up to an innocent mistake on the part of the machines, Supper Mario Broth’s repeated requests to actual humans at Twitter to remove the warning have not been answered.

Hey Twitter, you’re a big company. Hire some people to look after this stuff so cool Nintendo history accounts doing nothing wrong don’t have to put up with this kind of nonsense.

In the meantime, if you don’t already, you should follow SMB on Twitter, because interesting old video game trivia/images are always fun.

Frame from a commercial for the Hyundai Super Comboy, the South Korean licensed version of the SNES, featuring Buster Bunny and Dragon Ball characters alongside Mario series characters. pic.twitter.com/eaezjHygTE

— Supper Mario Broth (@MarioBrothBlog) March 31, 2018