How Diverse Emojis Encourage More Social Inclusion
When skin tone emojis were first launched, some feared social media users would abuse them. But a new study shows that’s not the case.
When emojis were formally recognized by the Unicode Consortium in 2010, they were rendered in the same generic yellow skin tone. By 2015, modifier codes were introduced to diversify their color. In addition to defaulting the icons to yellow, users could now tint emojis in five skin tones from "pale white" to "darkest brown."
Originally, there was some disagreement on the very idea that emojis should come in different shades. Some argued icons in different colors could be abused on social media to provoke antagonistic racial sentiment. Others wanted the skin tone of the icons to reflect the people using them. (Related: “We Fact-Checked 8 Animal Emojis—Here’s What We Found”)
A new study shows that social
