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hed | 3 months ago

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.

discuss

trollbridge|3 months ago

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

hamdingers|3 months ago

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.

aidenn0|3 months ago

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|3 months ago

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.

debugnik|3 months ago

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|3 months ago

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

FridayoLeary|3 months ago

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.

criddell|3 months ago

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|3 months ago

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

ekjhgkejhgk|3 months ago

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