As wild as we like to say politics in the U.S. have gotten, sometimes you have to stop and take a moment to be thankful we live in a country where the government isn't micro-managing our lives down to which emoji we use on social media.
Indonesia, however, made moves today to block the use of what it calls "gay emoji," asking Facebook and WhatsApp to filter out or block emoji such as the rainbow flag from the conservative Asian nation's version of those apps, TIME reports.
It's not clear yet how Facebook and WhatsApp will respond to the request from the country's Ministry of Communication and Informatics, but another app called Line, based in South Korea, has already reportedly given in to the country's request to "clean up."
Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority country, doesn't have nationwide laws against homosexuality for its more than 250 million people, though Quartz points out that one province "has adopted Sharia law and made having same-sex relations punishable with 100 lashes," and the nation's higher education minister has suggested banning gays from university campuses.
They also have really harsh legal penalties for other offenses, like shooting people to death for drug trafficking.
This isn't the first time we've seen a country with a horrible record on gay rights go in this weird, anti-emoji direction. Last summer, Russian President Vladimir Putin introduced an initiative to ban the use of emojis depicting so-called "gay behavior."
We're still not sure if that's even more ridiculous than Russia banning Nike's Gay Pride collection.
