Posted by on February 20, 2020 4:56 am
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Categories: µ Newsjones

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

It began, as things sometimes do on social media, with an emoji. A pineapple emoji to be exact.

Fans of Sanditon, an eight-part Jane Austen adaptation currently airing on PBS Masterpiece, have been deploying the icon on Twitter as a shorthand for their esteem and support of the show, which padded out the surviving chapters of Austen’s last, unfinished novel and turned them into a full-blown Regency romance. But if the scenes of sex and male nudity were not enough to set off paroxysms of controversy, the emoji certainly did.

“The fans decided it was a cute little thing they could use to promote Sanditon, but I thought it was a bit racist in the context of the show,” said Amanda-Rae Prescott, a Caribbean-American social media manager who lives in New York.

Read more at The Daily Beast.