Emojipedia Blog

Personally I hate seeing this happen both as a specific instance in the case of HK/Taiwan but just in general with corporations and politics.

Professionally and philosophically it's another interesting wrinkle in the implications of the emoji technology.

It reminded of something we saw a couple years ago when Apple changed the depiction of the gun emoji [0]. Interestingly, that blog post's proposed solution (note: same author as the OP article):

> Hide it.

This speaks to how fragile Unicode is, that things that were written in the past may so easily be changed in the future (like the replacement for Taiwan in China) or hidden in various ways. Another article mentions how emoji might be used by e.g. fascists to minimize uncomfortable concepts [1]. Even after you apply Hanlon's razor, there's still opportunity for good old-fashioned miscommunication [2].

[1] specifically mentions the mosquito emoji being introduced for health awareness, but what if we eradicate Malaria or even the mosquito as a whole, and then the irrelevant emoji is replaced with something not widely feared or hated, or maybe even beloved (like another social awareness campaign)? Then there'd be a lot of "Man I hate :positive-thing:" messages out there.

I'm not saying let's ban emoji, it's just interesting to think about. Still, I hope the whitewashing effect mentioned in [1] doesn't gain more ground, here or otherwise.

[0]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ (discussed:…

> determined by a big company (or by a standardization committee for that matter)

In practice the big companies are more in charge. Apple changed the pistol to a water gun (mentioned in the article and at [0]), and now all the big emoji sets from Google/MS/FB/Twtr/etc. also have a water gun instead of a pistol.

Apple also succeeded at preventing the rifle emoji and the Modern Pentathlon emoji (which contained a rifle) from being included, apparently with support from MS.

[0]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/20/apple-rifle-emoji-phones-unicode

It's pretty stupid how every other big tech company follows every single bad decision that Apple makes. Removing 3.5mm jack, removing pistol emoji, notches in screens, and now getting rid of chargers.

I personally do everything I can to boycott Unicode emoji. Some platforms like Slack/Discord allow for adding your own emoji which is nice. Language should not be controlled by a single entity.

For what it's worth, the Unicode Consortium seems to be trying to reign in the emoji explosion in the last few years. For example they won't process any new proposals for flags [1][2]:

> The Unicode Consortium will no longer accept proposals for flags. Flags that correspond to officially assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 region codes are automatically added, with no proposals necessary.

And they decided against adding Multi-skintoned Families to the RGI, as in, vendors can encode them if they really want to, but it's not recommended. Apple for example replaced their more complex family emoji with the recommended silhouettes afterwards [4].

1. https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag-emoji.html

2. https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Flags

3. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20114-family-emoji-explor.pdf?ref=blog.emojipedia.org

4. https://blog.emojipedia.org/ios-17-4-emoji-changelog/

This has not been true since early 2018. See: https://blog.emojipedia.org/all-major-vendors-commit-to-gun-redesign/ There was only a couple of years when vendors rendered it differently, and they worked toward a consensus, as they have for many other emojis.

Even if there was no vendor consensus, I'm not sure what the misunderstanding could be with this particular emoji. There is only one pistol emoji, and regardless of whether it is rendered as a water pistol or a revolver, it still is used to represent the concept of a pistol. There are better examples of emojis that used to be displayed with a facial expression or hand gesture that had a relatively different meaning depending on the platform. For example face with rolling eyes, person tipping hand (information desk person) and so on.

RE point 4, I believe that this was initially a descriptivist rather than prescriptivist step.

People were using emoticons, showing that emoji might be desirable. Some cell phone manufacturers/carriers added their own emoji [1]. They were very popular. Unicode added emoji to the standard, since lots of people were using it.

Not adding emoji would have been _more_ prescriptivist, and since it was desired anyway would have just caused fragmentation.

[1] https://blog.emojipedia.org/correcting-the-record-on-the-first-emoji-set/

No, the argument was that existing character sets used in Japanese feature phones had them. Because Japanese characters are wider than Western characters, those platforms could be more creative with pictographic characters as well, and could easily add color due to the proprietary phone OS. Unicode added them because Unicode's goal is to provide round-trip compatability with existing character sets.

https://blog.emojipedia.org/correcting-the-record-on-the-first-emoji-set/