Apple’s emoji keyboard is reinforcing Western stereotypes

Last year, Apple added an emoji search bar to iMessage, a simple feature that lets users quickly sift through over 3,000 standardized emojis by typing associated key terms. For example, iPhone users can now locate the heart eyes emoji by searching “love,” or the loudly crying face by searching “sad.” But when people look up different geographic regions or countries, such as “China” or “Africa,” Apple’s emoji keyboard sometimes spits back recommendations that reinforce Western stereotypes about those places. The term “Europe,” for example, frequently displays emoji suggestions for a globe, the European Union flag, the euro currency, a European post office building, as well as a football and castle. The term “Africa,” meanwhile, often only returns a globe, two country flags, and the hut emoji. The term “African” also displayed the hut emoji in tests. These results raise questions about biases that may be built into Apple’s language processing systems, though it’s unclear exactly how the emoji recommendations are generated. Apple did not return repeated requests for comment. “I wouldn’t say the feature is racist, but incomplete,” says O’Plérou Grebet, an artist from Côte d’Ivoire who designed his own independent set of emojis after noticing there was little representation of Africa in the emoji alphabet. “There is nothing wrong with huts because there are people living in them, but it’s a problem when the only emoji is a hut, because it reduces the continent to huts, and this is what could feed racist stereotypes.” 

Grebet says that Apple’s depiction of Africa reinforces the idea that the continent is poor, and promotes a monolithic depiction of an incredibly diverse region to iPhone users. Since November, a handful of users on Twitter have noted and complained to Apple about the “Africa” emoji search results. It’s not clear if they appear on every iOS device, but Rest of World has replicated the results using several different iPhones, language settings, and versions of the English-langauge keyboard.

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