10-Year-Old Starts Petition for Apple to Change 'Insulting' Nerd Emoji

Do you find the nerd emoji 🤓 offensive? One 10-year-old in England thinks it is, and has decided to do something about it. 

This week, the BBC reported on a petition from a child in the UK named Teddy Cottle, who started a campaign urging Apple to change the nerd emoji. Cottle’s problem is that nerd emoji is allegedly demeaning to people like him who wear glasses. “I hate the teeth at the bottom (of the emoji) and the name,” he told the BBC in a video interview. “It’s making me feel sad and upset.”

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Cottle’s solution is for Apple to change the nerd emoji into a “genius” emoji, which would feature a round yellow face wearing glasses, still smiling over a smaller grin, without the buck teeth. 

Cottle also published his petition online, which describes the current nerd emoji as “offensive and insulting to all those people in the world who wear glasses.”

“I think people who wear glasses are cool and I am worried that people who are getting glasses for the first time will think they are going to look like rabbits or rats,” he added.  So far, the petition has received 386 signatures.  

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Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the company isn’t the only one that’s adopted the nerd emoji. The Unicode Consortium, the gatekeeper for emoji across the tech industry, approved the symbol for release in 2015. Still, the nerd emoji’s original design, which featured two buck teeth, has faced criticism for evoking “anti-Asian stereotypes,” according to Emojipedia. 

“The fact that the default color of emoji faces is yellow further pushes this emoji into racist ‘yellowface’ territory,” it added.  Both Google and Facebook have since redesigned the nerd emoji to remove the buck teeth in favor of a more generic-looking smiling face wearing glasses. In contrast, Apple, Twitter, and Samsung have kept the buck teeth on their nerd emoji designs.