Dark skin emojis not used for abuse

Emoji characters with adapted skin tones are used positively and are rarely abused, an edinburgh university study of Twitter posts reveals.

Fears a range of skin colour options for social media icons might be used inappropriately provoking antagonistic racial sentiment – have been unfounded since their introduction in 2015, findings show.

Drawing on a sample of a billion tweets, researchers found most people choosing to modify their emojis opted for a skin tone aligned with their own.

In tweets where the selected skin tone was different from that of the user, posts were found to be mostly positive.

Users with darker skin, according to their Twitter profiles, were most likely to modify their emojis, while users with light skin were less likely.

This underlines the importance to users of being able to express their identity online, researchers say.

Almost half of modified emojis used a light skin tone, because most users are white.

Darkest skin tones were used least throughout most world regions, even in Africa, reflecting lack of internet access.

The study will be presented at the 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media in Stanford, California, in June.