Not neutral: Black and White readers associate yellow emoji with White ethnicity

ed.ac.uk

The report seems to have placed the yellow emoji into a binary choice of black vs white, so having about half of the black people who were asked identify it as a white/non-black image doesn't make it seem like this is ground breaking research.

Researchers have to put the test people in front of a choice, is normal, what is significant is that there isn’t a big difference between white/black people choices:

“Among Black participants, 56 per cent saw yellow emojis as more likely to signify White identity, while the figure for White participants was 63 per cent”

This is the key point of the this research in my opinion: there’s a slightly bias into yellow emojis as associated with White people, but just a slight difference.

Things like this make me hate the internet in modern times. Let's remove the skin-tone chooser, use a super neutral color to kill this Black vs White tribalism. The things we humans choose to conflict over is startling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com