Facebook launches diverse new family emoji but fails to include any interracial couples

The social network is attracting criticism for the perceived oversight

Every member of every family depicted by the new emoji shares the same skin colour (Emojipedia)

Facebook has introduced 125 new emoji, designed to represent a wide range of family types, skin tones and hair colours.

These include a father and son with a dark skin tone, or two mothers, a daughter and a son with a “medium” skin tone.

Yellow had previously been the only option.

However, the social network is attracting criticism because none of the new emoji represent interracial families.

Every member of every family depicted by the new emoji shares the same skin colour, and the shortcoming is being seen as a major oversight by the company.

However, as explained by TechCrunch, it’s harder to create diverse family emoji than it is to create diverse individual emoji, and not just because of the number of possible variations.

The code isn’t well-supported, meaning family members with different skin tones will sometimes be split up and displayed as separate emoji, even if they’re supposed to be part of the same one.

Still though, Microsoft managed to introduce support for 52,000 family emoji combinations in Windows 10 last year, including interracial groups.

The new emoji are only available on Facebook’s desktop and mobile sites, not the app or Messenger.

To access them, click on the Insert an Emoji icon in the bottom-right corner of the status bar, scroll down to the family section and long press your emoji of choice to bring up the different skin tones.

You can see all of the new emoji here.