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Daily Mail's article Thumb-down to the thumbs-up! Study reveals the cringeworthy emojis that are SO middle-aged and leave Gen Z youngsters rolling their eyes says

A spokesman for Perspectus Global said: 'Those who still use the thumbs up emoji in their texts and messages are officially over the hill, as it was voted the single uncoolest emoji by 16- to 29-year-olds.

It's unclear to me whether that was an actual survey, as the article was published on April 1st, and I can't find a reference to this survey on the Perspectus Global website. I've searched on Google with site:perspectusglobal.com emoji survey.

Even if it's not an April fool, is there a way to know whether the survey is trustable?

Laurel
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Florent2
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    They've got an interesting business model.. [apparently](https://www.gingercomms.com/2021/11/03/why-do-consumer-research-in-pr/) they get the press to advertise stuff for them in the news by putting out alleged poll-releases. – Nat Oct 14 '22 at 03:49
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    The entire Perspectus Global site seems to be mostly clickbait titles with breathless text. – barbecue Oct 14 '22 at 22:45
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    It's fairly trivial to put a poll on a website saying "which emoji is uncool?" and report "5 people said X, 7 said Y." Maybe you should be asking for details about the survey, if you doubt its accuracy. – Stuart F Nov 03 '22 at 11:35

1 Answers1

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Signs point to it being real

Perspectus Global mentioned the emoji survey (even showing a pic of the Daily Mail article) on their Twitter, after retweeting BAM mag's tweet linking to their article about the survey.

Looking at their website, they don't blog about many of the surveys they've done, which are often for other companies.

In the absence of real information about the survey, we can't say anything about its accuracy. We can say that the 25-29 year olds surveyed were Millennials, not Gen Z (despite being lumped together in a single 16-29 year old age group when reporting least favorite emojis) and everyone surveyed was British, which means it doesn't necessarily represent the entire emoji-using world.

Laurel
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    The concept of "generations" is a very loose one, and the cut-off dates are always arbitrary, and vary depending who you ask. 1993 is a bit further back than most definitions would take "Gen Z", but not by much. It's certainly just as wrong to claim that the only true definition would be a cut-off of 1997. – IMSoP Oct 14 '22 at 15:33