Today in about-frickin-time-news, Apple have vowed to update its emojis after Miley Cyrus and actor Tahj Mowry complained about the emoticon’s lack of ethnic diversity. We can totally relate – when The Debrief asked our Twitter followers to tell us the story of Beyoncé in emoticons, we realised how frustratingly difficult that task is because all of the female emojis are white. No wonder the maker of this (amazing) video of Drunk In Love in emojis had to resort to complex symbolism to get some of the lyrics across.
MTV Act decided that enough was enough and it was time for an update, so they asked Apple what they planned to do about it. And (surprisingly) they responded with a tangible plan. Katie Cotton, Apple's vice president of worldwide corporate communications said: ‘Tim forwarded your email to me. We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.’
There's no date set yet for Apple and the Unicode Consortium to resolve the issue, but this is all really good news, isn’t it? Imagine the emoji videos we could all be making soon – the possibilities could be endless! Better book a month off work now…
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.