Emoji analysis: a study on the use of skin tone modifiers on social media

Abstract

In 2015, Unicode introduced five different skin tone modifiers, that could be applied to the existing emojis that denoted humans. In this project, we analyze how people pose certain personalities using emoji skin colour modifiers under different situations. A simple frequency-based analysis was carried out on the usage of emoji and their skin tone modifiers. We also recorded that how the skin tone modifier changes when user uses hash tags or mentions other Twitter users. Our analysis reveals that with high probability a user will always use the same skin tone modifier which was used in the previous tweet. Dark skinned users are most likely to deviate from their base tone. Also, we found out that users mostly switch skin tone modifier when they either post a tweet mentioning exactly 1 person, or a plain text tweet with no hash tags or mention. Thus, it shows that people reveal multiple identities through tone modifiable emojis.