Their article format is Markdown, and if you enter the full shrug as Markdown then the back slash escapes the underscore to prevent it becoming markup, but it is removed in the process.
I was trying to make a joke about the journalist not caring about screen readers. Also, the correct way to shrug in markdown is ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ (verified in github and gitlab).
Markdown is not friendly to the shrug.