[hed]

It's interesting because like the article says legal teams may have to get smarter about recreating all the context when evidence like this is used. Even if the emojis rendered the reference implementation of Unicode and what vendors actually represent can vary quite a bit by platform or OS version.

[trollbridge]

An obvious problem is Apple renders the firearm emoji as a water pistol, and everyone else renders it as an actual pistol.

[hamdingers]

Almost everyone renders a water pistol now: https://emojipedia.org/pistol (click the "designs" tab)

Twitter/X is the only major exception, and they only changed it to represent a realistic gun recently.

[derefr]

Interestingly, this seems to be a pattern — in cases where the other providers are depicting an emoji “per the spec” but one provider is doing something unusual, the unusual depiction almost always spreads to fixation among the other providers.

For example, “loudly crying face” (https://emojipedia.org/loudly-crying-face) was literally supposed to just be a kind of mouth-open bawling expression. And that’s how everyone did it… except Apple. Apple gave their version a weirdly mixed expression that people sometimes interpret as “crying while laughing because something is so funny” (even though there’s already a separate emoji for that.) And iOS users kept using this emoji to mean that, while everyone else was confused. But instead of Apple fixing their emoji, everyone else gradually changed their depictions to conform to Apple’s non-standard interpretation. (Seriously, look at the history for each provider in the above link.)

[linkregister]

> Apple gave their version a weirdly mixed expression that people sometimes interpret as “crying while laughing because something is so funny” (even though there’s already a separate emoji for that.) And iOS users kept using this emoji to mean that, while everyone else was confused.

This sounds like a small social media niche being interpreted as representative overall. The first 10 search engine results were people primarily interpreting it as a crying/sadness emotion; some used it as an expression of general intense emotion. This seems consistent with actual crying, which can be a reaction to many different intense emotions, not just sadness.

[Nextgrid]

In a criminal defense scenario you should take into account how the sender sees it, potentially how the recipient sees it, and whether the sender was aware the recipient would see it differently.

[linkregister]

The case in question does not hinge upon the crying emoji. This was a tangential discussion.

[derefr]

I mean, it is how my own SO sees/understands this emoji (despite my insistence that that's not "what it means.") I just found out that she uses this emoji that way a few days ago, and then this article reminded me of that.

But I didn't mean to argue from social proof. Rather the opposite!

My argument was more—how else should you read the actual evidence? That evidence being that all the other providers' emojis started off depicting an "anguished" down-turned mouth and scrunched eyebrows; but that all of them then gradually reworked their depictions to instead include a neutral 'O' mouth and raised eyebrows, which removes the signifiers of anguish from the expression.

Why else would they all do that, except to cohere with the expectations of users who somehow communicated to them that they expected the emoji's expression to not be read as "anguished"?

[RandallBrown]

I dunno, the SoftBank emoji from 25 years ago is pretty much the same face as Apple's is now.

https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2000/loudly-crying-face

[doublerabbit]

"The SoftBank emoji designs heavily influenced Apple's original emoji font which was designed to be compatible with this set when launching in Japan, due to iPhone being a SoftBank-exclusive phone when first released."

Would be why.

[aidenn0]

Android changed in 2018 -- which adds even more of an issue since serious cases can take many years to go to trial, what it looks like on a phone today might be totally different than what it looked like on a phone at the time of the crime.

[madcaptenor]

Also IIRC there are some renderings where the firearm is aimed to the left and others aim it to the right. I'm having trouble sourcing this though - maybe this was true in the past or it was some other emoji that implies a direction.

[microtherion]

Theoretically, there's a mechanism in Unicode allowing you to aim left and right: https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Direction

But I don't think it's implemented widely, if anywhere.

[internetter]

All vendor's guns have always aimed at the left, however there are plenty of discrepancies, collectively referred to as "emoji fragmentation"

https://blog.emojipedia.org/2018-the-year-of-emoji-convergen...

[debugnik]

According to Wikipedia, now Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, WhatsApp and Facebook all use a water pistol. X was the only platform to roll that back.

[pxc]

All the big tech companies except Twitter now render it as a squirt gun afaik

[FridayoLeary]

What is it these days that perfectly normal words and things get censored? As far as harmful social phenomena go this is very small, but it's so silly.

[psunavy03]

Because there's a concerted effort to "denormalize" and stigmatize the perfectly legitimate activity of owning a firearm for lawful purposes like hunting, collecting, and sport shooting.

Just one more front in the culture wars.

[FridayoLeary]

I don't agree. It's more like an extreme fear of causing offence, which is one of the greatest crimes any public official or company can commit in todays day and age.

You can definitely fit it in to the ongoing war against culture, but you are reaching a bit.

I can't even blame Big Tech for it. It probably makes them more profit to be proactively timid. When that stops being true so will they.

[akimbostrawman]

>You can definitely fit it in to the ongoing war against culture, but you are reaching a bit.

Why would it be a reach when you yourself acknowledge it.

>It's more like an extreme fear of causing offence, which is one of the greatest crimes

Its pretty clear that the left leaning tech world is using it either way for there agenda.

[criddell]

I recently listened to some podcast where they talked about this in the context of threatening texts. Sending someone a gun emoji communicates a very different thing if it shows up as a water pistol vs a realistic looking gun. The court need to see what the sender thought they were sending and what the receiver saw.

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolutio...

[chuckadams]

To say nothing of the eyes and smile on U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO which kind of made it more disturbing.

[ekjhgkejhgk]

Yes. I wouldn't call that emoji "tears with joy" I would calling it "laughing so much you have tears".