Black or White but never neutral: How readers perceive identity from yellow or skin-toned emoji

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that emoji skin tone modifiers serve as salient signals of author identity on social media, influencing how readers perceive the ethnicity of the poster, with implications for research and design.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that emoji skin tone modifiers are perceived as indicators of author identity, revealing biases and perceptions related to default and modified emoji.

Findings

Emoji skin tone modifiers signal author ethnicity.

Default yellow emoji are associated with White identity.

Perception of emoji signals varies with participant ethnicity.

Abstract

Research in sociology and linguistics shows that people use language not only to express their own identity but to understand the identity of others. Recent work established a connection between expression of identity and emoji usage on social media, through use of emoji skin tone modifiers. Motivated by that finding, this work asks if, as with language, readers are sensitive to such acts of self-expression and use them to understand the identity of authors. In behavioral experiments (n=488), where text and emoji content of social media posts were carefully controlled before being presented to participants, we find in the affirmative -- emoji are a salient signal of author identity. That signal is distinct from, and complementary to, the one encoded in language. Participant groups (based on self-identified ethnicity) showed no differences in how they perceive this signal, except in the case of the default yellow emoji. While both groups associate this with a White identity, the effect was stronger in White participants. Our finding that emoji can index social variables will have experimental applications for researchers but also implications for designers: supposedly ``neutral`` defaults may be more representative of some users than others.