Facebook’s emoji for Messenger are becoming more diverse and less sexist.
Tomorrow, the chat app is rolling out a 1,500 new emojis on the chat app including the ability to let users customize the emojis’ skin color, placing it in line with Unicode Consortium’s standards.
Other changes include new red-headed emojis and more female police officers and doctors and more. That move comes a month after a group of Google employees pushed the Unicode Consortium to make the emojis more gender inclusive in its next update.
“We’re diversifying the genders to create a more balanced mix that’s more representative of our world,” Facebook said.
Technically, the change also means Facebook Messengers will now see a uniform set of emojis; prior to this, the emojis appeared inconsistently and would often revert to the emojis seen on their operating systems.
It’s the latest enhancement to Facebook Messenger, which has 900 million monthly users, including debuting new chat bots to ensure people spend more time (and money) within the app.
More in Media
WTF is headless browsing, and how are AI agents fueling it?
AI agents are putting headless browsing back in the spotlight. For media companies, that raises questions: How much traffic is real vs. automated?
How People Inc. is prioritizing traffic and revenue diversification to prepare for AI era
People Inc is preparing for AI’s impact on search and content discovery by focusing on traffic and revenue diversification and direct to consumer relationships.
One year in, Business Insider’s AI onsite search is boosting engagement
Although Business Insider’s AI search tool is currently only used by roughly one percent of Business Insider’s readership, it has significantly increased the engagement of those who do use the tool, with click-through to articles increasing by 50 percent since October.