askchapo

In slop "never do these hand gestures in these countries!!" articles, the names that come up most often are Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria (or West Africa more broadly), LatAm, Russia, Italy (specifically the south and Sardinia), Greece, and Australia (?? I wonder if they're referring to Aboriginal cultures or something, or maybe they actually meant Austria)

I frankly find it hard to believe in any case. Some netizens from some of these regions when asked about the supposedly offensive nature of the gesture say that they have never heard of it meaning anything other than like/good/OK; and in other regions, even if the thumbs up was offensive in the past, that meaning has largely faded away in recent decades due to internationalization. I get the impression that Iran is where "thumbs up means sit on my dick" is most prevalent today, but this is just an impression.

Edit: Tangentially relevant: in Japanese Sign Language, flipping the bird means BROTHER, and a thumbs up is how you fingerspell the syllable "ta". Most of the "a" syllables in JSL fingerspelling came from the ASL manual alphabet, but ASL T looked like an obscene gesture (fig gesture) to the Japanese, so evidently they replaced it with an obscene gesture to Iranians.