Emoji Sorting: Not Bias, Just Unicode

This exploration started after seeing a controversial tweet suggesting emoji sorting in programming languages exhibited white supremacy (troll post). The issue was even raised in the Gleam programming language repository, demonstrating how technical implementations can sometimes be misinterpreted through a social lens.

How emoji sorting with skin-color works

When sorting emoji characters with different skin tones, you might encounter what appears to be biased ordering. However, this is simply a result of Unicode’s implementation of the Fitzpatrick scale - a scientific classification of human skin types.

Each skin tone modifier is a separate Unicode character (U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF) that combines with the base emoji. The resulting order is purely technical, based on Unicode’s code point values, rather than any racial preference.