Dear MNHQ, I really would prefer not to see this advert …

[Edmontine]

How can you, in all conscience, allow this to appear on the site?

Please make it stop.

i too find this racist and wonder why Mumsnet can’t have better vetting if ad companies. Some of the ads have been too sexual, racist or if a really poor quality and looked like something I could have done better using Microsoft Paint whilst blindfolded.

They aren't skin tone colours, they are a scale of red. It is peoples subconscious racism that then equates dark red with brown/black and light red with white.

Oh come on.

I mean another word for 'light red' is pink, which is often used to depict white skinned people in illustration etc.

What an absolutely offensive answer. Tone deaf as well as blind

It looks red to me. And it doesn’t go in darkest to lightest either?

It’s totally red on my phone - maybe people see different colours?

Mumsnet sells ad space to low-tier ad networks that have repeatedly delivered shitty ads, viruses, drive-by downloads, browser hijacks and other scams.

But rather than stop doing business with those shitty ad networks, Mumsnet prefers to keep taking their money and letting its users deal with the fallout.

I've just checked and it's red on my lap top, but dark to light on my phone. How strange. So it must depend what device you're on.

If you have the link to the ad you can report it to the Advertising Standards Agency.

Yes the adverts on MN are almost all bad. Not like this one, this is an exceptionally awful example. But so many of them seem like dodgy links I’d never click on.

However you interpret the actual colours (and how your device displays them), it's still abundantly clear that the obvious suggestion is that the darker your skin colour is, the more stupid; and the lighter your skin colour, the smarter.

Even if people with very dark skin do the test and attain the 'genius' level as decreed by this test, it's effectively 'promoting' them to 'white intelligence' level, as though they somehow needed this.

Darwin believed something akin to this: that the paler your skin, the more evolved you were - so presumably also the more intelligent you would be. It's 2025; we really should have moved on from such horrible and ridiculously absurd prejudice by now.

Not that it makes a difference, but my own skin colour happens to be most similar to the person on the very right end of the scale. In no way whatsoever does that make me a genius, though!

I’m on my phone and it’s red/burgundy shades for me and so racism would never have come to mind. I suppose it is different depending on screen settings? Light settings?

It's shades of red. Nothing to do with skin, obviously. Christ, people will jump on anything and scream racism. It is nothing of the sort. Plus, it's not depicting skin but the contents of a head.

Its irrelevant who does the picking - MN subscribe to the service, set the parameters and publish the results. You can outsource work, the accountability remains with the company.

Ads on MN is a long running bug bear, both the wholly inappropriate content of some and the accessibility issues caused by others.

I’ve never seen a thread here which achieves anything other than “please report the individual ads” whack-a-mole style.

I genuinely do not experience the level of ad caused problems on other sites which I see on MN without an ad blocker. On the whole, people only go to the trouble of using ad blockers where they experience a problem as a result of the ads.

Same!! I haven’t had enough coffee yet clearly as it hasn’t occurred to me it was anything other than a daft IQ thing… then I noticed the skin tones 😵‍💫😬

is it MN that manage them though? I always thought they were personalised to you and your browsing history. Mine are currently all lawn mower related 👀

Shades of red to me too, and not in order either.

I had to read the comments to see what all the fuss was about.

This is exactly why I had an ad-blocker - for this site. Because I didn’t want to be subjected to this sort of thing. Or to have apologists explaining to me (me!) when and where I am allowed to experience racism, and when and where I am permitted to express my reaction to it.

It’s red to pink! No idea what everyone is getting offended for.

I've looked at it on my phone and on the website (I don't use the app) and it's very obviously dark brown to light pink in both places. I don't know where people are getting red from.

It doesn't matter whether the darker tone is red or not. The image shows gradation of darker tone to lighter tone, correlating with "increased" IQ. Totally unacceptable.

@MNHQ

Why red?
How does that make a Native American feel?
People from the First Nations were commonly referred to as 'Red Skins' in the past.

You are clearly looking for things to be offended by.

It comes from a determination not to see.

Sorry tagged wrong poster.