The Advertising Standards Board has dismissed complaints that SBS’s #FU2 Racism ad campaign earlier this year contained offensive language.
The campaign was promoting the broadcaster’s Face Up to Racism week of programming around race and prejudice in Australia. There were posters in bus shelters, train stations, shopping centres and large format billboards in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.
One complainant said the wording was offensive and blatantly rude: “Come on — let’s have some standards for our kids. What’s next, the ‘C’ bomb to get our attention?” the complaint read.
Another said, “If it is acceptable to say F U to racism, then why not to anything or anyone else that we don’t agree with?”
The board found that the wording on the poster (“#FU2 Racism — Face Up to Racism”) was clearly not an obscenity, given the proximity of a written explanation of what the ‘F’ stood for. The decision comes after another where complaints were made about advertisements for F*ck that’s delicious, a show on SBS Viceland.
The ‘f’ word is in danger of no longer being an expletive due to over use. We’ll have to find something else to utter when we stub a toe etc.
And just as well. I find it offensive that the word for an act hopefully between equals is used as if it means the strong one attacking the other.
Similarly the use as a form of abuse of the ‘C’ word instead of the source of all Life.
I say ‘fruit’ or ‘frag’ or ‘frack’ (yes, I do like Battlestar Galactica).