Apple is trying to add ethnic diversity to the list of faces that can be drawn on keyboards, the company revealed this week in an email sent to MTV.
The television channel recently sent an email to Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking whether the company intends to address the lack of diversity in the emoji keyboard on its devices. This week, a response was received from Katie Cotton, the company's spokeswoman: "Tim forwarded your email to me, we agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for their display on different platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we are working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard."
Emoticons, one of the most popular means of expression, are a series of faces that can be drawn using symbols found on any standard keyboard. Since 2010, a group has been working in Silicon Valley to establish a uniform standard for facial expressions, so that they can be supported on all devices and communication networks.
The forum responsible for supporting characters in various languages in the computing world has received many requests from multicultural activists, claiming that all the faces supported by the standard are of white people, while minorities are not represented in the variety of symbols available.
One petition on the subject states that the list of supported facial symbols includes "a boy, a girl, a man, a woman, an old man, an old woman, a blond boy and girl - all white. Of the 800 emoticons, the only ones that resemble non-white people are a guy who looks slightly Asian and another with a turban."
English 
Hebrew