Facebook are Introducing More Diversity with their Messenger Emoji

BuzzFeed

Facebook are trying to encourage more diversity within their emoji by changing five of their emoji and adding one hundred new ones as well. They're doing this as they feel there should be more emoji representing females and that users should be able to choose the skin colour of the emoji you use.

In the past, the pedestrian, police officer, jogger, swimmer and surfer were all male. I doubt this was because the designers thought all of the roles are always male, but it's more that a male design is a default that people will turn to. If there's something where you can create a male or female avatar, the adverts usually focus on the male avatar. Facebook have realised that this isn't necessary, however, and have decided to make these emoji female instead. This is a nice change, but for now the emoji will not appear as female on the keyboard, only once you've chosen them.

The other change they've made is the addition of skin colour options. Most of the emoji are actually yellow and unless you're a member of The Simpsons, that's not exactly an accurate skin colour. So this change wasn't made because people were accusing them of being racist. You can still use the yellow emoji if you don't want to personalise them. There are five different skin colours you can choose from and these shades can be used interchangeably and are easy to swap between.

The app itself will show you a preview of how the emoji appear so you can see how they'll look when you send them to someone. Facebook want their Messenger emoji to be different from other emoji, but the same across all devices. They don't like the fact that emoji look different depending on your phone so they hope that these changes will stand out.

Rosina Brooker

Rosina is a Songbird writer with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is glad to be playing around with apps and writing about them in the mean time! Follow her @Songbird_Rosina

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