[deruta]

Isn't it?! There's plenty of talking about how "we're regressing to hieroglyphs", but that doesn't capture the nuance in usage of emojis in different languages.

Your example expands well to old-school emoticons. Where I live, an "xD" serves as a laugh and is used in rather general way. Meanwhile in the Anglosphere it's stereotypically associated with specific demographics

[Dibby053]

What demographics?

[lolinder]

As an American who uses it (well, a variant, XD) and knows where I adopted it, I'll hazard a guess: millennial men who were extremely online in the late 2000s and early 2010s, during the Golden Age of phpBB and before the rise of the smartphone and modern social media.

[msephton]

FWIW phpBB was released in year 2000, just to place that on the timeline.