Soap dispenser refuses to help dark-skinned man wash his hands but Twitter blames tech
By Osahon Ibizugbe,
A soap dispenser has caused a huge debate on Twitter, over it’s seeming discrimination based on skin colour.
In a video, which was posted online, the soap dispenser was seen dispensing soap to a white skinned man and wouldn’t dispense for a dark skinned man.
While, some might say the machine has run out of soap, the black user goes on to show what happens when he holds a white tissue under it.
In the video footage, a white man places his hand under the nozzle of the dispenser and a small jet of white soap gets automatically squirted into his hand. But when a black man does the same, the dispenser fails to dispense.
The video was tweeted by one Chukwuemeka Afigbo with the caption: “If you have ever had a problem grasping the importance of diversity in tech and its impact on society, watch this video.”
His message was retweeted more than 85,000 times in just over 24 hours and liked more than 105,000 times.
Some of the reactions include the following;
Twitter user, @Kaitlmoo had a popular response, which was liked more 2,800 times: “Maybe if the company that designed this employed a single dark skinned person they’d have found this problem earlier.”
But @noticeofpoop responded: “Looks like a lighting issue to me. An IR scanner doesnt “see” skin color. poorly lit bathroom fixtures dont work for me either sometimes.”
@G1itcher argued: “Doesn’t detect infrared emitted from the hand, it’ll have a bulb and expects a certain amount to bounce back. Dark hands reflect less back.”
And @Monae_Kel added: “The point is these technical issues resulted from a lack of concern for all end users. If someone cared about the end users, would’ve used better tech….”