This is nonsense. A complete custom emoji font is something like 10MB. Shipping that to every website visitor is obscenely wasteful. This is why sites either just use native emojis, which all OSes support reasonably well by now, or download a little SVG for every emoji used.
Custom font is sensible fwiw. You can have a font with a single glyph implemented and you’ll override just that glyph, falling back to other fonts for the non implemented glyphs. This is why sites often have a list of fonts and not just one in the css. It’s also how other languages are supported. No Thai chars in your font? We just fall back until we hit a font with those glyphs available (might be an os level font rather than a site specified font but that’s fine).
I’d hate to try and hack a “intercept the text and add an image” type of system when the font rendering system has a trivial way to override individual glyphs already.
Doesn't that mean every font in the list needs to be loaded? And surely in many cases the sets of glyphs overlap and then a bunch of network bandwidth has been wasted?
The ones that are single/small subset glyph are fine since it’s a few bytes and very cacheable and then the others in the list are usually the well known font types “arial” etc. which don’t even need the site to supply a new font file (you can specify fonts in css with a file or simply a name of a common font/font family). So no real issue at all.
Fun fact – Apple will reject your app for using emojis in an unapproved way, for example as a UI element, button or reaction. Default system emojis can only be used within regular text. For any other use you have to import your own versions and can't use Apple's.
> For any other use you have to import your own versions and can't use Apple's.
You can use SF Symbols (https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...: “You can use a symbol to convey an object or concept wherever interface icons can appear, such as in navigation bars, toolbars, tab bars, context menus, and within text”). That would not use Apple’s emojis, but wouldn’t require you to create your own versions.
If emojis are speech then removing a particular one sure looks like censorship. Many people do consider them a form of speech, both socially and legally. For example, a thumbs up emoji can be considered agreeing to a contract.
Does the smiling face emoji look like a real face? No, it's a cartoon representation. Same for the handgun, which was replaced by a handgun that is also a cartoonish toy water gun. If anything it was brought more in-line with the rest of the icon style.
Like when cigarettes are replaced with lollipops in cartoons, you can debate if it does anything for kids or changes the meaning of a show or even matters at all, but you call it censorship. That's what it is, by definition.
When the platform is the web this means you get inconsistent emojis across browsers. Also Twitter has better designed emojis than any browser vendor hands down.
It's not, and also another reason Twitter has its own emojis is so that the Tweets have the same text wrapping on every platform. This means you can actually use the tweets as a canvas filled with emojis and know that the formatting will be the same everywhere.
Well yes. I don't think it's really defensible to render a code point using a glyph with a different semantic meaning. But "inconsistent" emoji rendering will always be a thing.
The way different platforms render emojis can change their perceived meaning. The most famous example is probably the pre-2016 Apple version of "grinning face with smiling eyes" which looked like a cringing face than a grinning one [1]. Obviously Apple eventually fixed that one, but if you want people to communicate across platforms without misunderstandings you should really ship your own emojis that are consistent everywhere.
The problem is that my platform is not your platform. And if I send you a water pistol with my phone and you receive a handgun on your PC, it is a problem.
So it makes sense for websites to force the rendering, so that everyone gets the same message.
Ideally, that pistol emoji mess shouldn't have started in the first place. It was clearly intended as a real gun, and variations in rendering shouldn't have impacted the meaning, but they did, and that's how we got there. If they wanted to off the real gun for a water pistol, they should have used a different code point, made keyboards only suggest that code point, and maybe censor the original pistol like they do swear words. No ambiguity.
I noticed that too. If I had to guess, and I don't, I'd say they changed just to be in line with everyone else. Although I wish they would have gone back to the ray gun as a sort of "told you so".
Ye. Emojis that render differently for different people do not work. It conveys the wrong emotions.
I had this half year when I though my mother was constantly pissed at me becouse she sent these angry devil robots to me. It turned out it was the default emoji font on my phone and all my friends used text based emojis so I didn't notice.
A real pistol and a water pistol send totally different vibes...
My thoughts exactly. For all the hand wringing they did about cutting costs, their focus is on redesigning emojis? It's obvious to me that Elon doesn't actually care about making the service better and solving real problems (like boosting revenue or fixing problems that impact users).
What makes you think their “focus” is on emojis? This is probably just one among many things they’re doing. And it’s the right thing to do, because the political censorship of the pistol emoji is yet another example of how deeply biased tech companies have been in pushing their politics onto customers.
There's zero cost to leaving the emoji as it is. The designer of the new version claims he's still working on it, so I don't know how you can say it's not a "focus". It's a waste of time and money for purely ideological reasons.
It's not a git revert. It is active effort to create a new emoji. There's zero cost to leaving it alone, there's material cost to changing it. Last time I checked, that's a bad way for a company that nearly went out of business to prioritize.
The amount of jokes, memes, and legitimate threats I've seen with the "water gun" emoji far outnumber the number of people using it to represent an actual water gun.
In fact, I can't recall a single time I've seen it used in the context of water guns.
People posting "<Skull><Water_Droplets><Water_Gun>" on Twitter/TikTok/whatever are just doing the emoji equivalent of saying "I'm gonna shoot this guy, in Minecraft."
Is it really better that the emoji is technically not an actual pistol? Is that gonna be the thing that stops people from making threats online?
It was actually one of their employees reading a tweet about it and then just implementing it within an hour or two. The person was shocked at the autonomy X employees have.
No because the reason it was changed is actually Apple's fault. They switched to a water pistol but because you can transmit an emoji cross platform, what may be perceived as a innocent message using the water pistol emoji could come across as a negative message when that water pistol is rendered as a gun in the receiver's phone.
Scroll down in this page for the example I am citing:
This really raises an interesting attack vector. Get influential enough at Apple -> push a change that could cause trouble for others given you are the largest entity -> they will be forced to adopt your change.
This should have been picked up by congress because it is some small group (or even one person) affecting the decisions of the entire industry.
Also its pretty fitting that Musk has applied his signature move: Make the change damn the consequences and then re-learn the reason why it was done in the first place when some disaster occurs. It must be nice that he never has to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Twitter barely changes -> why do they have so many employees if they barely do anything. 80% get fired -> this is the end of twitter. Employee changes emoji -> why are they making such unimportant changes.
Whatever happens at twitter, someone on the internet will complain about it.
The fact that the emoji was "censored" to begin with is weird to me. But the internet is weird and now people will be getting banned from X for using gun emojis to promote political violence.
"There. We tweaked your post a bit. More in line with doubleplusgoodthink now".-
"There. We tweaked your post a bit. Doubleplusgoodthink now".-
"There. You're doubleplusgoodthink now".-
"There. Doubleplusgoodthink".-
"Doubleplusgood".-
(But they do their own doubleplusgoodthink very well, methinks ...)
PS. More seriously, this is a concerning and latent issue. Moderation is a "cost" I am sure they'd like to streamline, and AI scales - as opposed to poor, psychologically "breakable" humans now moderating ...
... so I am sure they'll unavoidably come up with something.-
The original colored Google emoji (known as flour sacks, blobs, or gumdrops) had personality! Something like 7 years ago, they were neutered in favor of something much more generic; presumably, to make them more closely connote the meaning imparted by iPhone senders.
The only one I can think of that's visibly different now is the melting face. I wonder at what point it too will be changed to match Apple.
Such a thin veiled whistle blow against woke culture. The very concept of corporate-curated glyphs restricts and normalises communication to a limited range of concepts pre-approved by the architects of consumer culture. But apparently this is only a problem to you when it tries to discourage armed violence.
It is also rather unconnected to "woke", at least as far as I understand woke. Woke to me seems to me more about shouting down people than it is about listening to everyone. (So does "anti-woke". I don't think the painting supports either side; it rebukes both sides.)
I'm curious what/how you define "woke culture", because the only definitions of "woke" I've ever heard are basically "thing I don't like" or "the left". Neither of those definitions have helped me understand what you are so vehemently against.
Can you help me understand what woke culture is to you?
> Can you help me understand what woke culture is to you?
Within this context it’s replacing guns with water pistols, systematically and comprehensively, in the name of fighting gun violence.
On the same token, it’s replacing a water pistol emoji with a gun—in the aftermath of an armed assassination attempt on a Presidential candidate (and former President)—on a platform that regularly censors, in the name of free speech.
Performative nonsense designed to appeal to emotions instead of doing something about the implied problem. (Guns and censorship, respectively.)
It's definitely an umbrella term and we'd be here for a while discussing all facets of it, but in this case in particular it's the movement to censor speech under the guise of anti-gun rhetoric (like an emoji will cause gun violence). That is no different than Christians trying to ban violent video games.
Note that I am not the one who brought up the term to the conversation. I did want to avoid the labels as there's always someone who comes up and ask you to define the label instead of talking about the issue itself. In this case, censorship.
>Note that I am not the one who brought up the term to the conversation.
Of course, but since you said you were vehemently against it, I thought you'd be the better person to give me some perspective and help me learn.
>I did want to avoid the labels as there's always someone who comes up and ask you to define the label instead of talking about the issue itself. In this case, censorship.
I would have found it much clearer if your comment said "I am against censorship at it's core, vehemently", and as an added bonus you wouldn't be annoyed by me asking about it.
But, to be clear, the reason I asked about the label instead of the issue is because I don't understand what issue(s) woke culture represents to you. So trying to talk about those issues would be difficult.
My impression so far is that woke culture is more than just censorship. I'm very anti-censorship, but I've also been called "woke" in passing as an insult, so unfortunately I'm still left a bit confused. Thanks anyways, though!
Umbrella Term is a optimistic description for something so nebulous and used so frivolously. It is more commonly used as "anything I don't like is woke" and "any opinion that doesn't match mine is censoring me."
>I don't understand why people ask for a definition. A quick search brings up many useful definitions
Note how the definition there doesn't match any of the three definitions people gave me here, and none of the three here seem to match each other. Also, as your link says, the definition seems to have changed drastically in the past few years, so I can't even be sure that the link has the most up-to-date definition.
So, I was asking someone who seemed to be very passionate about being "against woke culture", to hear it directly from them. This is a conversational site, I figured it'd be fine, but seeing that my question is now downvoted I guess I need to better learn what conversations and questions are appropriate here.
In one sentence, wokeness is aggressively pursuing racial (and other identity-based) conflict above everything else, not caring what else you trample on (including even classic civil rights principles). "Microaggressions" is probably the most distinctively woke concept.
Censoring gun emojis is not woke in that respect, since it doesn't pursue any particular identity conflict (except, maybe, crusading on behalf of anyone with gun-related PTSD?). But the method (forcing people to sanitize their communication) and some aspects of the motivation (hand-wringing about some bits of language, acting like some people have extremely delicate sensibilities, using that to justify censorship) are similar to some prominent manifestations of wokeness and the corporate policies they push. So I can understand why the connection was drawn, though the term isn't quite appropriate.
Thanks for taking the time to write this out, I think it helps me understand a bit better. Every definition seems to be sort of different and personalized but I think it's beginning to coalesce into something in my mind, rather than just leaving me confused.
Usually when I try to ask this question, I just have angry people being angry with me, and I end up more confused. So it's nice to have some legitimate explanations come my way.
I'm a big fan of the Origin Story podcast, where they dig into words/concepts and look at where they started and how the use has evolved over time. They also cover some things like people, or conspiracy theories.
Sure, glad to help. I can give more detail including etymology.
"Woke" originally meant that a person has "awoken" to the true nature of society. They see the thing that others do not see! Unfortunately, it seems that that's also the only thing they see, or the only thing they care about. And that thing is racial / identity-group conflict. As I say, they cheerfully sacrifice principles like freedom of speech, meritocracy, proportionality, hard-fought civil rights ideals, etc., when it's inconvenient for the fight they want to pick in the moment. I think that, to a first approximation, when anyone says "Is this going too far?", they get accused of sympathizing with the oppressors and shamed or cast out, so the group goes farther, and we are seeing the results of iterating this process for decades. A peak moment was tearing down a statue of Abraham Lincoln, apparently in the name of anticolonialism.
That's the woke people themselves, a small, aggressive, highly vocal group with outsized influence. (There's also a larger group of relatively normal people with a surface-level understanding of it who go along with most of it; I think if they understood and believed all the details, most of them would recoil.) (Incidentally, most people instinctively understand that aggressively attacking others is bad, but via concepts like "microaggressions" and "privilege", the woke frequently find reasons to think that someone else attacked first.)
Then there's the legal and corporate environment. Civil rights legislation brought laws against discrimination and creating a hostile environment for identity groups in companies. In the absence of mind-reading, a claim of discrimination is difficult to prove or disprove, and a "hostile environment" could be interpreted in many ways. I think that the "game of telephone" chain from the text of the law, to the interpretation of the law (and evidentiary standards) in courts, to lawyers' understanding, to what company lawyers tell management, to what sticks in management's brain and gets implemented, has yielded essentially "If you offend the woke identity groups, then that puts you at significant legal risk, so best appease them. Also it's good to pay them lip service, host Pride events, etc., because that reduces legal risk." Additionally, some portion of management themselves are woke, and some additional portion earnestly believe in civil rights as a cause and tend to take the woke at their word when they claim their policies are the right and proper next steps. And finally, on a personal level, expressing dissent against a woke-aligned policy is, in many cases, perceived to put one's own career at risk (in some cases the lawyers may say it's a liability to keep a person like that; and, having seen cases of this, many people err on the side of caution, creating a "chilling effect").
So you get a lot of corporate policies meant to appease the woke. Some may be the exact policies the woke asked for. Others may be cynical appeasement, and by design they will be difficult to distinguish from the first type. Some policies are invented by well-intentioned people believing in civil rights principles. Some are the outcome of some kind of compromise.
It's not necessarily clear which of these should be called "woke policies", both in theory and in practice. It doesn't help that, whereas you could identify Democrat or Republican policies by looking at official websites, and probably get reasonable consensus on what are "conservative policies" or "progressive policies" based on prominent self-identified conservative figures and institutions, the woke do not call themselves "woke" (with occasional exceptions like "Woke Kindergarten") and object to anyone else calling them that; it's understood to be a pejorative. The woke will tend to call themselves advocates o...
I think micro-aggressions are very real, but maybe the word is a little off. They're not aggressive necessarily, but they are micro.
What I mean is that definitely phrases and questions change meaning, a tiny bit, based off of historical understanding of race and gender. On the surface it seems like a wild proposition, but it's really true.
- wow you're so articulate!
- your hair looks so clean!
- don't you like this kind of music?
- you're a better driver than I expected!
- you're so nurturing!
To you, or me, innocuous. But people say these things for a reason. I've never heard a white man be told he's articulate, or that his hair looks clean. Do you know what I mean?
These things are racially charged and "othering", regardless of if the perpetrator knows it or intends it. I'd say the vast majority of ANY prejudice is unconscious, meaning people don't know they're it.
"Woke" is best described as an umbrella term for overrighteous performative moralizing leftist authoritarian fundamentalism. It's effectively used opposite of "fascism" which has become an umbrella term for "things I don't like" or "the right".
> In no way does an emoji encourage armed violence.
Obviously, in a vacuum, an emoji does not do anything at all. Though emojis are used in context to convey intent, just as words are. Would you say words do not encourage armed violence? Sure, the dictionary does not, but when pieced together, narratives can be created that do. That is not to say we should ban words, but lets not kid ourselves and pretend they have no power at all.
> That is not to say we should ban words, but lets not kid ourselves and pretend they have no power at all.
Indeed.
The whole reason I value freedom of speech is not a love of certain voices, but because of the power of speech to effect change.
Took me a long time to realise that while all improvements are change, not all change is an improvement. Dictators fear free speech because it has the power to take away their power. That power can also be used, has been used, to take away democracy.
But isn't that the point of the person you are replying to?
Its the meaning of the ideas being communicated not individual glyphs. A gun emoiji does not neccesarily mean "lets shoot up the place". A water pistol is similar enough to a gun that anyone who has that meaning in mind can easily just use it and be understood. Or they could just use something else with an understood meaning. After all, many emoiji have context specific meanings. An eggplant is not just an eggplant.
Its just downright silly to ban things at this level of abstraction. It wont stop people talking about guns.
The sentence "it's time to cut down the tall trees" doesn't seem like it should trigger a genocide, but it did.
If you send a firearm emoji in response to someone asking what they think of the 2020 USA presidential election result, that seems to be a fairly explicit encouragement of armed violence. A water pistol, not so much — likewise either "gun" variant in response to plans for summer holiday sports ideas.
When it comes to tall trees? Well, are you talking to an arborist or are you the RTLM in 1994.
What's your opinion on this current change of meaning?
The previous one has now been in use for 6 years, many messages are about to change meaning, this time in potentially quite negative ways.
Follow-up: What's your opinion on the word "woke"? Do you still use the original agreed upon definition from AAVE, or do you prefer the way conservatives have mutated our language? (The question is rhetorical, but I hope you see the point I'm making.)
I think we remember that differently. At the time I recall people caring quite a lot. You can find articles written about it on just about every mainstream media organization.
I'm still a bit unclear on your position towards the current changes. Your post makes it sound like you oppose changes in general, but your tone makes me think it's specific to the change from 2016. How do you feel about the current changes?
People cared, but not the people making the changes.
I think the change back is good and we should very strongly push for immutable emoji. The first one was a massive mistake and years of using the squirt gun doesn’t justify it.
It really is weird. And if someone supported the change, why exactly stop there? We can make fonts have custom ligatures where the letters `gun` together could have a completely different rendering, so we could replace it with a single glyph that looks like "water gun" -- I can't see how that's more absurd than censoring the gun. It's not as though it's more difficult to threaten violence with text than with an emoji.
There is nothing stopping you from uploading a picture of a gun and putting it in your post. Why is an emoji any different or more dangerous than letting people upload pictures?
That’s like saying you can put pictures of the letters you need in a post to form words. It’s completely impractical in systems that even allow you to upload pictures and impossible for anything based on Unicode only input
Yes but pretty much every single medium where you can use an emoji you can upload a picture.
Signal, iMessage, X, FaceBook, etc.
This thread is specifically about X so that’s what I mostly am talking about here.
But pretty much every communication medium being used allows you to upload pictures. It doesn’t make any sense to me why you’d remove the emoji and not also try to censor all pictures of guns.
good, if they use it in a threatening manner it's good that they get themselves banned. I've personally gotten 27 people banned on twitter and 11 suspensions. I'm sure some came back but I made sure they didn't just look like russian/iranian bot accounts and were people as best as I could determine. All were obviously white supremacists or people threatening others.
Yeah, stuff like this just should not ever be changed in this way, IMO. It shouldn't have been changed in the first place, but two wrongs don't make a right either, it just makes the problem even worse.
If we have older communications that use an emoji, it can retroactively edit the meaning if that emoji renders to a fundamentally different object than it used to, so this kind of change has the side effect of rewriting history unless people take extra care to only use fonts that match the age of the document.
It's already hard enough to communicate clearly and effectively in the modern world without having the rug pulled out from under us with stuff like this.
Indeed, this is very 1984. Changing the meaning of a word, people express their thoughts with emojis, the meaning (representation in this case) should never be altered in such way.
Bullying will occur no matter what emojis are available - even if you have to use 𓂺 or similar.
Various knives are available if you want it, so if anything we should add MORE emojis (gun combining character something else = various types of gun, say).
In fact, it's easier to have one "known bad" emoji to check than having hundreds to look at.
And changing it to water pistol reduces the bullying? I have seen racism expressed through colored emoticons, destroying its original intents of inclusivity. It's stupid to change it in the first place, this is just doubling the stupidity.
Does changing it to a water pistol actually reduce bullying at all? I suspect not. My bet is that the water pistol change was driven by virtue signaling and corporate risk aversion rather than any real belief that it would do anything useful.
Conversely though, the decision to change it back is probably driven by trolling and attention-seeking more than anything.
But this emoji comes included by default with mobile phones. Realistically than means that young children get to see and use this emoji. Unknowingly, they might be sending death threats, whereas with a water gun that would be like a joke.
The official unicode name is "pistol" (explained as "handgun, revolver"), and the example representation is a modern magazine-fed pistol [1]. Changing it back to what it's supposed to be is fine by me.
Are you implying that a water pistol is not a "handgun"? Or that you could not make a water pistol that could also be a "revolver"? Does "revolver" include revolver action rifles, so long as you can use them with one hand (sawed offs, etc). If not, why not? If so, would that be a "more" appropriate emoji for some reason?
I'm not saying they're further out of spec. But I disagree with your implication that they are somehow further in spec than a water pistol. Pistol is pistol.
> Are you implying that a water pistol is not a "handgun"
Yes. If I asked you to bring me a gun (or a handgun) I don't think anyone would argue I might have meant a water pistol. A water pistol is a gun-shaped object, or an object that imitates a gun, but it isn't a gun.
If I ask you to bring me a gun, and there is a water gun right next to you and you argue that "I might have meant water pistol" (colloquially: refusing to assess the water gun as a "gun"), I would assume you were ignorant, dishonest, or both.
Right on. And if someone made a "bear" emoji as an image of a gummy bear, I wouldn't accuse them of being out of spec. I would just find it personally misleading. Things that might be appropriate to say with a bear emoji might not be appropriate to say with a gummy bear emoji. That could be confusing, and it could be frustrating. But - as the standard emoji convention is often just "use whatever is closest" (see: eggplant/peach) - I don't think there would be any real, practical problem by people using gummy bears as their "bears". So it's perfectly in spec and could easily be a practical solution.
The same is true of the gun emoji. Hard for me to picture a scenario where I would need to communicate "real gun" but not want to say the words "real gun". And given the ubiquitous (until now) change in the icon, I have empirical evidence that it was an entirely practically appropriate solution. And, again, it was no further out of spec than an M1911.
Great to see this change. The decision to get rid of the gun emoji was itself an act of political activism, highlighting the left leaning bias in many of these organizations - or at least the power given to the voices that pushed for those changes. It was a naked way to influence the culture around guns, and make them less visible. But it also killed funny uses of the actual pistol emoji. For the record, the underlying Unicode name is “PISTOL” - not squirt gun or ray gun or whatever.
I also think that as harmless as a change from a pistol to ray gun might seem, it is a signal of how far these companies will go to push one particular ideology onto everyone - its employees, customers, etc. These large tech platforms are too powerful and influential to be allowed that kind of deep and far-reaching influence on our politics and culture, and they should behave neutrally as much as possible.
The most recent Unicode standard (https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf) still names it "PISTOL", although the official locale data designates "water pistol" as the short name in English and most other languages.
The water pistol is an analog of a real gun no matter how silly they are shaped. Growing up most of the plastic guns were models of the Colt M1911 and other semi automatic pistols. As a kid you knew what you were emulating: shooting a real gun at someone. Hell, Cowboys and Indians is a fucked up game for kids used to play. Even the comical looking ray gun is a futuristic energy weapon that is usually depicted as being more devastating than a projectile weapon by burning or vaporizing flesh - totally harmless fun!
Guns are guns. Stop trying to pretend water pistols are somehow harmless images.
I grew up with the argument that video game violence causes real violence. At the time, conservatives were keen on censoring violence, blood and gore in movies, video games and TV shows. It was the liberal establishment that defended artistic violence and sexuality. Now it seems like the pendulum swung and liberals seem keen on promoting squirt gun emojis, meanwhile some of the most popular video games on the market are things like Call of Duty where you blast people away with automatic machine guns and sniper rifle head shots.
It's very strange keeping up with the shifting tides of opinions about these sorts of things.
I'm not convinced this is a liberal vs. conservative thing in the first place. It seems like a straightforward continuation of the trend: depictions of violence are popular in some circles, yet disreputable in others, so big corporations looking to serve both markets have to find awkward, stodgy compromises to try and keep everyone happy.
It's all pretty silly. We're arguing over a gun emoji on social media, where all sorts of horrific videos are posted, including real people getting shot by real guns.
The book bans are only primary school libraries. I think this is fine, K-12 is mandatory, so clearly the state and local districts should have influence over what's allowed there. There's restrictions on religious teachings in school and likewise there should be limits on opinionated secular topics that don't advance reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. There's plenty of exposure to that stuff via other channels.
Censorship is censorship. The fact that it is happening in a government-run institution makes it worse. Like I said, everyone is for it when it suits them, and outraged when it doesn't.
No, it's not censorship when an elementary school is selective about what material they teach kids. For example, I don't think violent video games like Call of Duty should be banned, but I also don't think kids should be playing Call of Duty in school computer labs. It's irrelevant to basic education. Discretion is obviously mandatory in order to focus students on subject material that expands their skills while not trying to convert them to Scientology or any other similar ideology.
It's still conservatives, but conservatives from the culture that liberals ushered in over the past several decades. This explains the college campus dynamic as well, where all these professors that fought for liberal ideas in the 1970's and 1980's grew old and stopped questioning their own ideas. Now they're busy closing the ranks and tone policing anybody that pokes holes in their dogma. That dynamic isn't liberalism running amok, but rather just the bog standard pearl clutching of conservatism. Actual liberalism still exists, it just doesn't get media attention as pitting red tribe conservatism versus blue tribe conservatism creates more arguing (aka engagement).
I'm sorry, is there some kind of difference between streaming a bloody match of Call of Duty on Twitch or YouTube and sending a gun emoji as a funny expression of sarcasm (which obviously doesn't mean the same with a squirt gun) to my friends or followers? It's silly that such dichotomies even exist.
I don’t know if I would choose to use the phrase ‘woke mind virus’ myself, but it does seem highly suspicious that a bunch of tech companies, all known for their very clear political biases, decided to change the meaning and symbolism of the “PISTOL” Unicode emoji in a short time frame. To me that was indeed an act of “woke” political activism and pressure, and it seems to have spread to many companies quickly. All to suppress people from sharing their ideas in an uncensored way, which is just a ridiculous thing for operating systems and social media platforms to do. So the phrase doesn’t exactly seem wrong in its criticism?
A hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at the time a text was written.
Personally, I think putting a huge set of pictograms into the Universal Character Set was a mistake and that emojis should be deprecated immediately, and this is the #1 reason why: the meaning of a text should not normally change based on the font used to render it.
>A hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at the time a text was written.
Is this any different than for words? "Retarded" used used to be the polite way to convey intellectual disability, until it slowly turned into a pejorative. Same word, different meaning.
Sure, meaning always depends on context, but this is a lower-level difference. If I copy an English sentence from a hundred-year-old book into Microsoft Word, it doesn't change the meaning of the sentence. If I write a sentence containing emojis on e.g. an Android phone and read that exact bitwise-equivalent text string on an Apple phone on the same day, it could have a wildly different meaning because of the font. This has already happened -- a few years ago Apple updated their font to have colored foot emojis, which sparked some controversy[1] because the version of the feet for black skin tones (incorrectly) depicted the sole of the foot as black. There was a thread on Twitter (can't find a link, sadly) where someone was confused by the posts talking about this because their Android phone's version of the emoji showed a side view of a foot instead of a bottom view. The original tweet was unintelligible to this reader because they were using a different font than the writer.
One of the advantages of written language is that it's based on a discrete set of symbols that are used to form discrete words. This allows writing to last much longer than many other forms of communication. Emojis are a weird semi-discrete hybrid form of communication, which means they're bound to cause problems as time goes on.
This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles. Isn't the entire purpose of having a standard set of emojis as part of Unicode to enable reliable communication of the concepts and emotions associated with them?
In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere. But the same codepoint showing up as a water pistol to one half of the audience and as a gun to the other seems to be just begging for misunderstandings - and in a charged atmosphere like X no less where this could easily spiral into drama, shitstorms or worse.
Disagree. If the cat emoji becomes a dog, it isn't OK if it's the same everywhere. I don't think it's much different to turn the poo emoji into flowers, the bomb emoji into a kiss, or the pistol emoji into a water pistol.
I'm not sure that's necessarily wise, since the underlying takeaway is that it's fine to attempt to change the meaning or rendering of pre-existing symbols as long as you get away with it. The threat of having the change you are attempting to force be contested over a long period of time should, hopefully, act as a deterrent to such behavior.
You have to stand for something and Musk is someone who continually shoots his foot for his beliefs. Probably does not matter to him if no one follows (although now that I know the history, everyone should have pushed back in 2016 but the second best time is to push back now)
The bizarre state of this emoji was that it already faced this change. One vendor (Apple I believe) decided to make it a water gun, slowly the rest of the industry followed, officially changing its name to "water pistol". Now the old battles are new again.
The official name still is just "pistol" (and even more the latest Unicode standard specifies it as handgun, revolver). Not sure how Emojipedia decides on used name (seems to follow Apple) but (in this case at least) isn't using the standard one.
I would extend "the same thing everywhere" through time as well, i.e. it's a bad thing to ever change the meaning of an emoji after it's been published, for the obvious reason that this messes with old texts and all other locations where the emoji has been used with the old meaning.
This means that the move back then to change the gun to a water pistol was an extremely bad move, no question here. But moving it back to the original meaning now is just as bad - it will just disrupt in the same way lots of newer texts that assume the glyph is a water pistol.
It will keep happening the same way languages gradually change and for exactly the same reasons. Being in flux isn’t a bug, it’s the content of culture.
Doing the stuff differently compared to /the other group/ to know you belong to /this group/ is everybody’s favorite game.
There are different ways how languages can change. A language changes organically, if individual people simply talk differently than their predecessors, out of convenience, without any specific intent or plan behind it. That's the way languages have always changed throughout history and keep changing.
Deliberately changing a language and pressuring other people to adopt certain changes in their vocabulary is something entirely different. That too has been tried often in history, but has usually led to conflict and was part of expressions of power.
Emojis can change their meaning organically too, if people just start using them in a different way. Eggplant emoji being the most obvious example I think.
But pushing an update to change the glyph would be about the most top-down and deliberate way to change its meaning that I can think of.
No, I don't think that applies here. Languages evolve and new terminology enters the lexicon all of the time, but that absolutely does not retrospectively change the rendering of pre-existing expressions of language.
Meanings change, jump from one word to another, words take the opposite meaning all the time. Pronunciations change too, letters that are supposed to sound differently suddenly don’t and other way around too.
This would still happen with or without the platforms doing it. Like any other piece of language, emoji will change meaning over time or between groups, and make it hard to read other group's texts. For a current example, if you see a text saying "I loved your <eggplant emoji>", it can have at least two very different, but quite common meanings (either liking some eggplant based food, or a sexual allusion).
> In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere.
It used to be a real gun everywhere, until the schoolmarms started chiming in. It is supposed to be one, no matter what the ministry of truth thinks it should be replaced with.
This is why I believe including emoji in unicode was a blunder. A capital "A" is the same in any font; I can write a message in monospace and my interlocutor can read it in sans-serif, or tap in morse code and have it rendered in hand- writing, in all cases the difference is immaterial.
On the other hand we don't use pictures in the same way, the meaning of the message depends on the exact picture used as part of the "font". The whole thing about flags and skin tones are symptoms of the same problem.
I’m pretty sure the thumbs up emoji or the slightly smiling emoji won’t get different interpretations based on font.
And here the issue is not in font differences (or different pictures of the same thing getting different interpretations): it’s the thing represented that’s actually different.
> A capital "A" is the same in any font; I can write a message in monospace and my interlocutor can read it in sans-serif, or tap in morse code and have it rendered in hand- writing, in all cases the difference is immaterial
Many typefaces are have problematic I/l/1 and O/0 characters, and that is material enough that applications avoid those characters entirely to avoid potential confusion.
The problem is deeper than unicode: the fact that any codepoints can be rendered differently from client to client or typeface-to-typeface was always problematic, even back it was mostly ASCII.
Even more, fonts having multiple colors in a glyph was a huge complexity explosion for font rendering, for terminals, and more. You can see a very quick technical summary of different ways of encoding colors in fonts here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType#Color_fonts
But anyway, images should have remained separate things, png or whatever. Fonts rendering is complex enough with complex scripts e.g. Arabic, but that is the domain of fonts/shaping/rendering.
Such a hugely expensive technical mess because people want their stupid color emojis.
You want to stay stuck in the past, that's your call. I for one stay fascinated by the prospect of colour being introduced into written languages to denote intent now that we don't have to grapple with ink. We're talking on the scale of centuries, but even Arrival didn't have the guts to include colour into the lexicon of its alien language.
With, of course, accessibility for those needing it.
Even worse, the Emoji descriptions (on some platforms) don't correspond at all to what the emoji actually represents.
For example, the " " emoji, described by Unicode as "health worker" is called "non-binary doctor" by Apple.
If you send that emoji in a text to somebody, and they're e.g. using accessibility software, wearing AirPods and have notifications read out to them by Siri, or have their phone integrated with CarPlay etc, the message they'll hear is very different from what you actually intended to say.
The point of any glyph at all being allocated a Unicode codepoint, is that the glyph already exists in documents somewhere (either real paper documents, or digital documents in some other legacy encoding); and if Unicode didn't include a codepoint to encode that glyph, then that text wouldn't be able to be faithfully represented in Unicode.
Which means that some ephemeral undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead (as in “cellphone novels” in late-90s Japan, now permanently committed to the Internet in the form of SJIS encoding + some particular feature-phone’s SJIS pictograph codepage that no modern OS can decode.)
Or worse, that the character and its contribution to the meaning of the document might be lost entirely (as in MSN or ICQ messenger emoticons, where exporting chat logs as HTML would just strip the emoticons out.)
Putting whatever glyphs already exist into Unicode, no matter how rarely, is precisely what makes Unicode uni-code — i.e. an encoding that guarantees lossless archival "transmission into the future" of all texts, such that all texts should be better off transcoded into Unicode. (At least if the intent is to archive their semantic meaning as text, rather than their bytewise representation as data for software-archaeology purposes.)
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The standard of "if it already has usage, then it must get a Unicode codepoint so that the document can be Unicode-encoded" is all well and good at face value, and worked well as a guideline for the first ~10 versions of the Unicode spec. Until ~2009, pretty much nobody was arguing against codepoint allocations being "warranted."
But then the modern mobile platforms realized that they essentially had a gun they could hold to Unicode’s head — in the sense that any glyph they wanted to invent, they could threaten to release into the wild as proprietary encoding if Unicode doesn’t include it. And because millions of people would be guaranteed to make tweets et al using that new symbol, Unicode is essentially forced to include it. Even though it doesn’t exist yet until that moment.
All the “dumb” emoji—and color emoji in general, and the explosion in variation selectors—came after that. In est, they’re Apple and Google’s fault, not the Unicode Consortium’s.
Unicode is definitely a prescriptive standard. Code point 65 is a capital A because Unicode says so -- any such standard is necessarily prescriptive.
> Which means that some ephemeral undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead
I'm not arguing against the need of some standard for representing those, I'm just objecting to the technical decision of incorporating them as code points, because they don't serve the same semantical purpose.
Instead you could have introduced -- for example -- a simple vector graphics format.
The difference is that the alphabet has well-defined meaning. Stylistic differences in the appearance of letters doesn't alter those meanings. This is not so true with emojis. Their meaning is directly determined by their appearance and so stylistic differences can alter their meaning.
> Unicode is definitely a prescriptive standard. Code point 65 is a capital A because Unicode says so -- any such standard is necessarily prescriptive.
You're missing the point. Unicode is descriptive like a dictionary is descriptive: it describes — and thereby locks into place and somewhat formalizes (really: ossifies) — existing usage.
If you prefer, rather than "prescriptive" vs "descriptive", you can pretend I said "proactive" vs "reactive." Unicode as a standard reacts to existing out-of-Unicode usage of glyphs, by defining into existence Unicode code-points to allow the encoding of those glyphs. (Or rather, to allow encoding of any of the equivalence-class-hypersphere of glyph-configuration-space described by the name of the codepoint, as that codepoint. Those particular codepoints have been defined through usage, whether the Unicode Consortium likes it or not.)
But even that's not quite accurate, because, especially with the modern forced assignments by Apple/Google, Unicode in fact is purely describing — documenting — codepoint assignments that the OEMs decided on and implemented unilaterally, ahead of standardization. (I.e., Apple/Google now just allocate new codepoints for emoji and assign them glyphs all on their own — and Unicode then must play catch-up, including those codepoints in the standard only after they're already shipping on real devices and thereby effectively already "locked in" in their meanings.)
> Because they don't serve the same semantical purpose. Instead you could have introduced -- for example -- a simple vector graphics format.
They quite clearly do serve a semantic purpose:
• Screen readers can describe an emoji — and smart ones can even use an emoji at the end of a sentence to add emotional color to their reading of the sentence. This would not be possible if emoji were just vector images.
• LLMs have particular trained associations on what a given arbitrary Unicode codepoint should relate to. It would be prohibitively difficult for them to form the same associations between regular word tokens, and the huge sequence of tokens that collectively represents a vector image.
• Search engines can index emoji just like any other text. No search engine that I know of could embed a vector image in its fulltext index in a useful way.
• If a font doesn't represent an emoji, people can still copy-and-paste the unrepresentable-codepoint-glyph rendering of the codepoint into their OS's character map to get a Unicode-standardized description of the codepoint. This wouldn't be true if emoji were just arbitrary vector images.
Also, if you wanted to oust some glyphs from Unicode in favor of embedded vector images, where would you stop? If U+1F60A "Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes" shouldn't be in Unicode, should U+2660 "Black Spade Suit"? How about U+21F6 "Three Rightwards Arrows", or U+2713 "Check Mark"? U+2766 "Floral Heart" / U+2042 "Asterism"?
I always thought the purpose of a standard set of emoji is to keep the Unicode commitee employed...
If you don't have a heated debate about the meaning of the dot over the poop emoji every year they may find themselves out of a job and that would be too productive.
> This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles.
My first thought exactly. My 2nd thought, glancing at the graphic of like 6 years and 6 companies and the evolution of the emoji.. there's a nontrivial amount of money thrown at all this "work", and once you think about all the meetings and emails and design iterations, the opinion pieces on the result, etc, the frivolous spend for this kind of nonsense is probably in the millions. Not to mention all of us taking a media break while we're on the clock! No real political sentiment even needs to be involved.. all this probably just represents make-work activity by folks looking to justify their continued employment. The political aspect is just the hook, since the bike-shedding after that is guaranteed.
Emojis lost the plot when they became too anthropomorphic. Now that they're realistic humanoids they need to represent all skin types, genders, ages, pregnant men, etc.
A smiley doesn't need gender, sex, or age, to convey meaning.
I'm with you on that one. I think that was an indicator of how political sentiment and goals seems to have shifted at one point from "reconcile differences and eventually just feel as one human race" to "emphasize differences and pledge allegiance to whatever group I belong to".
I wonder if there was a way for other clients to detect apple and translate their 'watergun' into a new emoji while keeping backwards compatibility on all other clients. Or another way for all vendors to push back against Apple is for all agree to not render the new emoji from Apple devices. Its too late now but one of these two would have been a good solution in 2016 to push back against Apple's nonsense. I guess since this is also used in SMS there is no way to properly detect the client its coming from?
> This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles. Isn't the entire purpose of having a standard set of emojis as part of Unicode to enable reliable communication of the concepts and emotions associated with them?
Does anyone see what's happened here?
A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else undoes the change and suddenly now they're blamed for waging a political battle!
We see this elsewhere too. Github with master -> main, despite master remaining the default everywhere else and causing endless confusion with examples/tutorials all over the internet. Immigrants -> Migrants, voting laws returning to pre-covid rules (and being likened to Jim Crow on Steroids as a result), etc.
There's a segment of society that's in love with renaming/changing things everyone else was fine with, and then when people try to change things back - they're attacked as radical political warmongers.
The phrase "small group of people" is doing a lot of work, I think. We had the largest technology/media companies in the country making similar changes.
The reality is a small handful of people - or even one person - makes these decisions.
Nonetheless, even if we were to believe 100% of the people at Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al decided on this change together, it's still a small group of people and it still is a political decision.
All of the employees of all of those companies combined are still a small group of people compared to the number subjected to the results of their decisions.
I can't speak for everyone, but as far as I'm concerned, the initial change to a water gun was just as stupid and damaging as this one. My point is just that changing it back now is not undoing the damage, it's creating even more damage.
One of the reasons why I hesitate to use emojis is that there isn't enough standardization of what they look like. I've seen texts I've written that include them on other devices and have been pretty dismayed that that even relatively minor visual differences can make a huge difference in the meaning I intended vs the meaning that was actually received.
The water pistol/gun thing is this taken to an extreme. The initial change was bad because it introduced a huge amount of uncertainty in meaning. The change back is bad for exactly the same reason.
In my experience, the water pistol was still used to denote violence, it was just dressed up to somehow make big tech feel less culpable for violent(ly emotional) social media.
As with all emojis, what they mean depends on the social group using them. In my social group, the gun version was never used for anything. When it became a water pistol, though, it started to get used to indicate a certain sort of playfulness.
You're assuming everyone is using the same version of unicode and the same fonts. Even this premise isn't true. For example, for me, it never changed because I do most of my typing/etc on an older system without modern unicode extensions post-v6. It was and is always a mess. There's no stability like you say. But if we want to measure something objective: the majority of unicode versions have been the firearm, not the water pistol.
> Isn't the entire purpose of having a standard set of emojis as part of Unicode to enable reliable communication of the concepts and emotions associated with them?
Maybe? I mean, Unicode already explicitly does not encode glyphs, but code points. So point 65 is capital Roman “A”, but Unicode says nothing about how it should be displayed.
Going further, certain code points represent characters which Unicode considers “the same” character in Japanese/Chinese/Korean even though they may be different in meaning, pronunciation, and visual appearance. Thus, you need to know which language is being writing before you can pick the correct glyph to put on the screen.
So, while stupid, it doesn’t seem exactly wrong or unprecedented for X to change their glyph from a squirt gun to a pistol.
This change started with Apple changing the emoji from a handgun to a water pistol out of the blue. I don't see the issue with another platform deciding they don't want that change, or preferring another style.
The representation itself isn't standardized I think, a lot of emojis don't look very similar across different platforms.
Speaking objectively it’s either dumb or it matters.
There’s no reality that exists where it was dumb so you shouldn’t care it was changed but it’s dumb so it shouldn’t be changed back because it’s dumb right so it doesn’t matter what it is…
The people who changed it thought it mattered, the people changing it back do too so as dumb as it is, I guess it matters to both these groups, even if it is kinda dumb.
These dumbest of political battlegrounds are entirely the problem caused by the people who demanded the initial change, no one cared about this till someone cared about it.
I bet you more people prefer the water gun. Two opinions are not automatically equal. Especially with anything regarding languages, a consensus is to be respected.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadI’d hate to try and hack a “intercept the text and add an image” type of system when the font rendering system has a trivial way to override individual glyphs already.
Doesn't that mean every font in the list needs to be loaded? And surely in many cases the sets of glyphs overlap and then a bunch of network bandwidth has been wasted?
You can use SF Symbols (https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...: “You can use a symbol to convey an object or concept wherever interface icons can appear, such as in navigation bars, toolbars, tab bars, context menus, and within text”). That would not use Apple’s emojis, but wouldn’t require you to create your own versions.
Source? Signal seems to be using the native emojis for reacts, and they don't seem to be having issues.
It wasn't removed, it was augmented.
This is a case of companies rendering 1F52B to something it is specifically not.
This was done on purpose.
1: https://emojipedia.org/beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes#design...
So it makes sense for websites to force the rendering, so that everyone gets the same message.
Ideally, that pistol emoji mess shouldn't have started in the first place. It was clearly intended as a real gun, and variations in rendering shouldn't have impacted the meaning, but they did, and that's how we got there. If they wanted to off the real gun for a water pistol, they should have used a different code point, made keyboards only suggest that code point, and maybe censor the original pistol like they do swear words. No ambiguity.
... but more than that, I don't like how they keep playing with those designs all the time.
I had this half year when I though my mother was constantly pissed at me becouse she sent these angry devil robots to me. It turned out it was the default emoji font on my phone and all my friends used text based emojis so I didn't notice.
A real pistol and a water pistol send totally different vibes...
Just can't win.
Edit - and another 10 defending the decision on HackerNews forums
Oh and wait until you hear about the Google Doodle...
Without being the project manager, you're speculating on the amount of focus this had.
It's already making buzz so if it was an hour of work, I'd say the marketing effect alone was worth it.
I'm simply saying you're talking about Twitter right now because of it, and it was a small change.
You know it was if you're an engineer, let's not play dumb.
Not sure why everything relating to X has to be so hostile.
All the people arguing both sides of this, then and now, are motivated by ideology. That includes the parent post you replied to, me, you, Elon, etc.
People often argue over cultural changes. And then there's politics on top of that. And in Elon's case perhaps publicity, also.
In fact, I can't recall a single time I've seen it used in the context of water guns.
People posting "<Skull><Water_Droplets><Water_Gun>" on Twitter/TikTok/whatever are just doing the emoji equivalent of saying "I'm gonna shoot this guy, in Minecraft."
Is it really better that the emoji is technically not an actual pistol? Is that gonna be the thing that stops people from making threats online?
Scroll down in this page for the example I am citing:
[0]:https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/
This really raises an interesting attack vector. Get influential enough at Apple -> push a change that could cause trouble for others given you are the largest entity -> they will be forced to adopt your change.
This should have been picked up by congress because it is some small group (or even one person) affecting the decisions of the entire industry.
Also its pretty fitting that Musk has applied his signature move: Make the change damn the consequences and then re-learn the reason why it was done in the first place when some disaster occurs. It must be nice that he never has to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Whatever happens at twitter, someone on the internet will complain about it.
And noone voted for it, all companies effectively in charge of these emojis (Google, Apple, etc.) decided for everyone that it was for the best.
What will they change next, who initiated and coordinated that effort, and why, are all important questions.
I'm very much against it. It's the same or worse than altering the text content of a message.
Once you put an emoji symbol out there for a character code and it's agreed upon, it should be immutable.
(But they do their own doubleplusgoodthink very well, methinks ...)
PS. More seriously, this is a concerning and latent issue. Moderation is a "cost" I am sure they'd like to streamline, and AI scales - as opposed to poor, psychologically "breakable" humans now moderating ...
... so I am sure they'll unavoidably come up with something.-
Some were really bad and would change the meaning of a message, things like showing a broken heart instead of a heart.
The only one I can think of that's visibly different now is the melting face. I wonder at what point it too will be changed to match Apple.
But yes, I am against woke culture at it's core, vehemently.
In no way does an emoji encourage armed violence.
Are you against violent video games as well?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Speech_(painting)#/...
It is also rather unconnected to "woke", at least as far as I understand woke. Woke to me seems to me more about shouting down people than it is about listening to everyone. (So does "anti-woke". I don't think the painting supports either side; it rebukes both sides.)
I'm curious what/how you define "woke culture", because the only definitions of "woke" I've ever heard are basically "thing I don't like" or "the left". Neither of those definitions have helped me understand what you are so vehemently against.
Can you help me understand what woke culture is to you?
This is a genuine question.
Within this context it’s replacing guns with water pistols, systematically and comprehensively, in the name of fighting gun violence.
On the same token, it’s replacing a water pistol emoji with a gun—in the aftermath of an armed assassination attempt on a Presidential candidate (and former President)—on a platform that regularly censors, in the name of free speech.
Performative nonsense designed to appeal to emotions instead of doing something about the implied problem. (Guns and censorship, respectively.)
Thanks! This helps me understand it a bit more. Sort of a synonym for "virtue signalling" it seems?
I genuinely have no idea what that term means anymore.
Note that I am not the one who brought up the term to the conversation. I did want to avoid the labels as there's always someone who comes up and ask you to define the label instead of talking about the issue itself. In this case, censorship.
Of course, but since you said you were vehemently against it, I thought you'd be the better person to give me some perspective and help me learn.
>I did want to avoid the labels as there's always someone who comes up and ask you to define the label instead of talking about the issue itself. In this case, censorship.
I would have found it much clearer if your comment said "I am against censorship at it's core, vehemently", and as an added bonus you wouldn't be annoyed by me asking about it.
But, to be clear, the reason I asked about the label instead of the issue is because I don't understand what issue(s) woke culture represents to you. So trying to talk about those issues would be difficult.
My impression so far is that woke culture is more than just censorship. I'm very anti-censorship, but I've also been called "woke" in passing as an insult, so unfortunately I'm still left a bit confused. Thanks anyways, though!
As for woke - I don't understand why people ask for a definition. A quick search brings up many useful definitions: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Woke
Note how the definition there doesn't match any of the three definitions people gave me here, and none of the three here seem to match each other. Also, as your link says, the definition seems to have changed drastically in the past few years, so I can't even be sure that the link has the most up-to-date definition.
So, I was asking someone who seemed to be very passionate about being "against woke culture", to hear it directly from them. This is a conversational site, I figured it'd be fine, but seeing that my question is now downvoted I guess I need to better learn what conversations and questions are appropriate here.
I'm still new around these parts. Forgive me.
In one sentence, wokeness is aggressively pursuing racial (and other identity-based) conflict above everything else, not caring what else you trample on (including even classic civil rights principles). "Microaggressions" is probably the most distinctively woke concept.
Censoring gun emojis is not woke in that respect, since it doesn't pursue any particular identity conflict (except, maybe, crusading on behalf of anyone with gun-related PTSD?). But the method (forcing people to sanitize their communication) and some aspects of the motivation (hand-wringing about some bits of language, acting like some people have extremely delicate sensibilities, using that to justify censorship) are similar to some prominent manifestations of wokeness and the corporate policies they push. So I can understand why the connection was drawn, though the term isn't quite appropriate.
Usually when I try to ask this question, I just have angry people being angry with me, and I end up more confused. So it's nice to have some legitimate explanations come my way.
Their Woke episode might be worth a listen.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ncWO9Aj1kMtQxBsHf0aYg
https://pod.link/1624704966/episode/0b0e2c363a94280fe0ae576b...
"Woke" originally meant that a person has "awoken" to the true nature of society. They see the thing that others do not see! Unfortunately, it seems that that's also the only thing they see, or the only thing they care about. And that thing is racial / identity-group conflict. As I say, they cheerfully sacrifice principles like freedom of speech, meritocracy, proportionality, hard-fought civil rights ideals, etc., when it's inconvenient for the fight they want to pick in the moment. I think that, to a first approximation, when anyone says "Is this going too far?", they get accused of sympathizing with the oppressors and shamed or cast out, so the group goes farther, and we are seeing the results of iterating this process for decades. A peak moment was tearing down a statue of Abraham Lincoln, apparently in the name of anticolonialism.
That's the woke people themselves, a small, aggressive, highly vocal group with outsized influence. (There's also a larger group of relatively normal people with a surface-level understanding of it who go along with most of it; I think if they understood and believed all the details, most of them would recoil.) (Incidentally, most people instinctively understand that aggressively attacking others is bad, but via concepts like "microaggressions" and "privilege", the woke frequently find reasons to think that someone else attacked first.)
Then there's the legal and corporate environment. Civil rights legislation brought laws against discrimination and creating a hostile environment for identity groups in companies. In the absence of mind-reading, a claim of discrimination is difficult to prove or disprove, and a "hostile environment" could be interpreted in many ways. I think that the "game of telephone" chain from the text of the law, to the interpretation of the law (and evidentiary standards) in courts, to lawyers' understanding, to what company lawyers tell management, to what sticks in management's brain and gets implemented, has yielded essentially "If you offend the woke identity groups, then that puts you at significant legal risk, so best appease them. Also it's good to pay them lip service, host Pride events, etc., because that reduces legal risk." Additionally, some portion of management themselves are woke, and some additional portion earnestly believe in civil rights as a cause and tend to take the woke at their word when they claim their policies are the right and proper next steps. And finally, on a personal level, expressing dissent against a woke-aligned policy is, in many cases, perceived to put one's own career at risk (in some cases the lawyers may say it's a liability to keep a person like that; and, having seen cases of this, many people err on the side of caution, creating a "chilling effect").
So you get a lot of corporate policies meant to appease the woke. Some may be the exact policies the woke asked for. Others may be cynical appeasement, and by design they will be difficult to distinguish from the first type. Some policies are invented by well-intentioned people believing in civil rights principles. Some are the outcome of some kind of compromise.
It's not necessarily clear which of these should be called "woke policies", both in theory and in practice. It doesn't help that, whereas you could identify Democrat or Republican policies by looking at official websites, and probably get reasonable consensus on what are "conservative policies" or "progressive policies" based on prominent self-identified conservative figures and institutions, the woke do not call themselves "woke" (with occasional exceptions like "Woke Kindergarten") and object to anyone else calling them that; it's understood to be a pejorative. The woke will tend to call themselves advocates o...
What I mean is that definitely phrases and questions change meaning, a tiny bit, based off of historical understanding of race and gender. On the surface it seems like a wild proposition, but it's really true.
- wow you're so articulate! - your hair looks so clean! - don't you like this kind of music? - you're a better driver than I expected! - you're so nurturing!
To you, or me, innocuous. But people say these things for a reason. I've never heard a white man be told he's articulate, or that his hair looks clean. Do you know what I mean?
These things are racially charged and "othering", regardless of if the perpetrator knows it or intends it. I'd say the vast majority of ANY prejudice is unconscious, meaning people don't know they're it.
Obviously, in a vacuum, an emoji does not do anything at all. Though emojis are used in context to convey intent, just as words are. Would you say words do not encourage armed violence? Sure, the dictionary does not, but when pieced together, narratives can be created that do. That is not to say we should ban words, but lets not kid ourselves and pretend they have no power at all.
Indeed.
The whole reason I value freedom of speech is not a love of certain voices, but because of the power of speech to effect change.
Took me a long time to realise that while all improvements are change, not all change is an improvement. Dictators fear free speech because it has the power to take away their power. That power can also be used, has been used, to take away democracy.
Its the meaning of the ideas being communicated not individual glyphs. A gun emoiji does not neccesarily mean "lets shoot up the place". A water pistol is similar enough to a gun that anyone who has that meaning in mind can easily just use it and be understood. Or they could just use something else with an understood meaning. After all, many emoiji have context specific meanings. An eggplant is not just an eggplant.
Its just downright silly to ban things at this level of abstraction. It wont stop people talking about guns.
also "Tried, but didn’t like doing crime. GTA5 required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just couldn’t do it." - Elon Musk
And he didn't try to ban GTA, that's his personal opinion of not wanting to commit virtual violence himself.
The sentence "it's time to cut down the tall trees" doesn't seem like it should trigger a genocide, but it did.
If you send a firearm emoji in response to someone asking what they think of the 2020 USA presidential election result, that seems to be a fairly explicit encouragement of armed violence. A water pistol, not so much — likewise either "gun" variant in response to plans for summer holiday sports ideas.
When it comes to tall trees? Well, are you talking to an arborist or are you the RTLM in 1994.
The previous one has now been in use for 6 years, many messages are about to change meaning, this time in potentially quite negative ways.
Follow-up: What's your opinion on the word "woke"? Do you still use the original agreed upon definition from AAVE, or do you prefer the way conservatives have mutated our language? (The question is rhetorical, but I hope you see the point I'm making.)
The gun emoji had existed as a gun before as well for that many years. Nobody cared about rewriting text history on that change either.
I'm still a bit unclear on your position towards the current changes. Your post makes it sound like you oppose changes in general, but your tone makes me think it's specific to the change from 2016. How do you feel about the current changes?
I think the change back is good and we should very strongly push for immutable emoji. The first one was a massive mistake and years of using the squirt gun doesn’t justify it.
Signal, iMessage, X, FaceBook, etc.
This thread is specifically about X so that’s what I mostly am talking about here.
But pretty much every communication medium being used allows you to upload pictures. It doesn’t make any sense to me why you’d remove the emoji and not also try to censor all pictures of guns.
You cannot do that on signal, X, Facebook, etc.
Yeah I… don’t think that’ll be happening. From Twitter, sure, from X?
“I want Twitter’s gun emoji to look like a real gun instead of a wussy toy!” - Elmo Munk
If we have older communications that use an emoji, it can retroactively edit the meaning if that emoji renders to a fundamentally different object than it used to, so this kind of change has the side effect of rewriting history unless people take extra care to only use fonts that match the age of the document.
It's already hard enough to communicate clearly and effectively in the modern world without having the rug pulled out from under us with stuff like this.
Various knives are available if you want it, so if anything we should add MORE emojis (gun combining character something else = various types of gun, say).
In fact, it's easier to have one "known bad" emoji to check than having hundreds to look at.
Conversely though, the decision to change it back is probably driven by trolling and attention-seeking more than anything.
1: Page 12 of https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf (search for 1F52B)
I'm not saying they're further out of spec. But I disagree with your implication that they are somehow further in spec than a water pistol. Pistol is pistol.
Yes. If I asked you to bring me a gun (or a handgun) I don't think anyone would argue I might have meant a water pistol. A water pistol is a gun-shaped object, or an object that imitates a gun, but it isn't a gun.
If I ask you to bring me a gun, and there is a water gun right next to you and you argue that "I might have meant water pistol" (colloquially: refusing to assess the water gun as a "gun"), I would assume you were ignorant, dishonest, or both.
The same is true of the gun emoji. Hard for me to picture a scenario where I would need to communicate "real gun" but not want to say the words "real gun". And given the ubiquitous (until now) change in the icon, I have empirical evidence that it was an entirely practically appropriate solution. And, again, it was no further out of spec than an M1911.
I also think that as harmless as a change from a pistol to ray gun might seem, it is a signal of how far these companies will go to push one particular ideology onto everyone - its employees, customers, etc. These large tech platforms are too powerful and influential to be allowed that kind of deep and far-reaching influence on our politics and culture, and they should behave neutrally as much as possible.
https://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-list.html
#1121
Guns are guns. Stop trying to pretend water pistols are somehow harmless images.
(That would be a fun legal hypothetical.)
It's very strange keeping up with the shifting tides of opinions about these sorts of things.
Buddy's mind has wondered off to the hadal zone. Well beyond the point of "no return".
I mean... it's not exactly a SR9 either, but it's definitely not a 1911 as the twitterrer implied.
None of those vendors have previously depicted the pistol emoji as a contemporary handgun.
Personally, I think putting a huge set of pictograms into the Universal Character Set was a mistake and that emojis should be deprecated immediately, and this is the #1 reason why: the meaning of a text should not normally change based on the font used to render it.
Is this any different than for words? "Retarded" used used to be the polite way to convey intellectual disability, until it slowly turned into a pejorative. Same word, different meaning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan
One of the advantages of written language is that it's based on a discrete set of symbols that are used to form discrete words. This allows writing to last much longer than many other forms of communication. Emojis are a weird semi-discrete hybrid form of communication, which means they're bound to cause problems as time goes on.
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6347073/People-ou...
In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere. But the same codepoint showing up as a water pistol to one half of the audience and as a gun to the other seems to be just begging for misunderstandings - and in a charged atmosphere like X no less where this could easily spiral into drama, shitstorms or worse.
It doesn't matter if it wasn't. It was done, and it was done at a time when there was political will for everyone to follow suit and be consistent.
The question is whether it's OK to turn it back. Because there ISN'T the same political will. And other emoji providers will NOT follow X in this.
Having X "go back" because the original change was "unjust" doesn't fix the underlying problem. It creates a new one.
Literally perfect application of the concept of "two wrongs don't make a right"
This is a problem since unicode characters are meant to be unchanging and rendered to the same glyph forever.
Stop destroying standards because they hurt your feelings.
This means that the move back then to change the gun to a water pistol was an extremely bad move, no question here. But moving it back to the original meaning now is just as bad - it will just disrupt in the same way lots of newer texts that assume the glyph is a water pistol.
Doing the stuff differently compared to /the other group/ to know you belong to /this group/ is everybody’s favorite game.
Deliberately changing a language and pressuring other people to adopt certain changes in their vocabulary is something entirely different. That too has been tried often in history, but has usually led to conflict and was part of expressions of power.
Emojis can change their meaning organically too, if people just start using them in a different way. Eggplant emoji being the most obvious example I think.
But pushing an update to change the glyph would be about the most top-down and deliberate way to change its meaning that I can think of.
Chairman Mao enters the chat
Meanings change, jump from one word to another, words take the opposite meaning all the time. Pronunciations change too, letters that are supposed to sound differently suddenly don’t and other way around too.
It used to be a real gun everywhere, until the schoolmarms started chiming in. It is supposed to be one, no matter what the ministry of truth thinks it should be replaced with.
> drama, shitstorms
On X? How will they ever recover.
On the other hand we don't use pictures in the same way, the meaning of the message depends on the exact picture used as part of the "font". The whole thing about flags and skin tones are symptoms of the same problem.
And here the issue is not in font differences (or different pictures of the same thing getting different interpretations): it’s the thing represented that’s actually different.
Many typefaces are have problematic I/l/1 and O/0 characters, and that is material enough that applications avoid those characters entirely to avoid potential confusion.
The problem is deeper than unicode: the fact that any codepoints can be rendered differently from client to client or typeface-to-typeface was always problematic, even back it was mostly ASCII.
But anyway, images should have remained separate things, png or whatever. Fonts rendering is complex enough with complex scripts e.g. Arabic, but that is the domain of fonts/shaping/rendering.
Such a hugely expensive technical mess because people want their stupid color emojis.
With, of course, accessibility for those needing it.
For example, the " " emoji, described by Unicode as "health worker" is called "non-binary doctor" by Apple.
If you send that emoji in a text to somebody, and they're e.g. using accessibility software, wearing AirPods and have notifications read out to them by Siri, or have their phone integrated with CarPlay etc, the message they'll hear is very different from what you actually intended to say.
The point of any glyph at all being allocated a Unicode codepoint, is that the glyph already exists in documents somewhere (either real paper documents, or digital documents in some other legacy encoding); and if Unicode didn't include a codepoint to encode that glyph, then that text wouldn't be able to be faithfully represented in Unicode.
Which means that some ephemeral undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead (as in “cellphone novels” in late-90s Japan, now permanently committed to the Internet in the form of SJIS encoding + some particular feature-phone’s SJIS pictograph codepage that no modern OS can decode.)
Or worse, that the character and its contribution to the meaning of the document might be lost entirely (as in MSN or ICQ messenger emoticons, where exporting chat logs as HTML would just strip the emoticons out.)
Putting whatever glyphs already exist into Unicode, no matter how rarely, is precisely what makes Unicode uni-code — i.e. an encoding that guarantees lossless archival "transmission into the future" of all texts, such that all texts should be better off transcoded into Unicode. (At least if the intent is to archive their semantic meaning as text, rather than their bytewise representation as data for software-archaeology purposes.)
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The standard of "if it already has usage, then it must get a Unicode codepoint so that the document can be Unicode-encoded" is all well and good at face value, and worked well as a guideline for the first ~10 versions of the Unicode spec. Until ~2009, pretty much nobody was arguing against codepoint allocations being "warranted."
But then the modern mobile platforms realized that they essentially had a gun they could hold to Unicode’s head — in the sense that any glyph they wanted to invent, they could threaten to release into the wild as proprietary encoding if Unicode doesn’t include it. And because millions of people would be guaranteed to make tweets et al using that new symbol, Unicode is essentially forced to include it. Even though it doesn’t exist yet until that moment.
All the “dumb” emoji—and color emoji in general, and the explosion in variation selectors—came after that. In est, they’re Apple and Google’s fault, not the Unicode Consortium’s.
> Which means that some ephemeral undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead
I'm not arguing against the need of some standard for representing those, I'm just objecting to the technical decision of incorporating them as code points, because they don't serve the same semantical purpose.
Instead you could have introduced -- for example -- a simple vector graphics format.
The standard says “pistol”, what a pistol looks like is left to the implementer.
You're missing the point. Unicode is descriptive like a dictionary is descriptive: it describes — and thereby locks into place and somewhat formalizes (really: ossifies) — existing usage.
If you prefer, rather than "prescriptive" vs "descriptive", you can pretend I said "proactive" vs "reactive." Unicode as a standard reacts to existing out-of-Unicode usage of glyphs, by defining into existence Unicode code-points to allow the encoding of those glyphs. (Or rather, to allow encoding of any of the equivalence-class-hypersphere of glyph-configuration-space described by the name of the codepoint, as that codepoint. Those particular codepoints have been defined through usage, whether the Unicode Consortium likes it or not.)
But even that's not quite accurate, because, especially with the modern forced assignments by Apple/Google, Unicode in fact is purely describing — documenting — codepoint assignments that the OEMs decided on and implemented unilaterally, ahead of standardization. (I.e., Apple/Google now just allocate new codepoints for emoji and assign them glyphs all on their own — and Unicode then must play catch-up, including those codepoints in the standard only after they're already shipping on real devices and thereby effectively already "locked in" in their meanings.)
> Because they don't serve the same semantical purpose. Instead you could have introduced -- for example -- a simple vector graphics format.
They quite clearly do serve a semantic purpose:
• Screen readers can describe an emoji — and smart ones can even use an emoji at the end of a sentence to add emotional color to their reading of the sentence. This would not be possible if emoji were just vector images.
• LLMs have particular trained associations on what a given arbitrary Unicode codepoint should relate to. It would be prohibitively difficult for them to form the same associations between regular word tokens, and the huge sequence of tokens that collectively represents a vector image.
• Search engines can index emoji just like any other text. No search engine that I know of could embed a vector image in its fulltext index in a useful way.
• If a font doesn't represent an emoji, people can still copy-and-paste the unrepresentable-codepoint-glyph rendering of the codepoint into their OS's character map to get a Unicode-standardized description of the codepoint. This wouldn't be true if emoji were just arbitrary vector images.
Also, if you wanted to oust some glyphs from Unicode in favor of embedded vector images, where would you stop? If U+1F60A "Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes" shouldn't be in Unicode, should U+2660 "Black Spade Suit"? How about U+21F6 "Three Rightwards Arrows", or U+2713 "Check Mark"? U+2766 "Floral Heart" / U+2042 "Asterism"?
If you don't have a heated debate about the meaning of the dot over the poop emoji every year they may find themselves out of a job and that would be too productive.
My first thought exactly. My 2nd thought, glancing at the graphic of like 6 years and 6 companies and the evolution of the emoji.. there's a nontrivial amount of money thrown at all this "work", and once you think about all the meetings and emails and design iterations, the opinion pieces on the result, etc, the frivolous spend for this kind of nonsense is probably in the millions. Not to mention all of us taking a media break while we're on the clock! No real political sentiment even needs to be involved.. all this probably just represents make-work activity by folks looking to justify their continued employment. The political aspect is just the hook, since the bike-shedding after that is guaranteed.
A smiley doesn't need gender, sex, or age, to convey meaning.
An iPhone 1 would display a gun still.
I think that has potential for hilarity. It would certainly soften the impact of a certain group of imbeciles.
Does anyone see what's happened here?
A small group of people made a political decision and force changed the pistol emoji into a water gun. Then... later on, someone else undoes the change and suddenly now they're blamed for waging a political battle!
We see this elsewhere too. Github with master -> main, despite master remaining the default everywhere else and causing endless confusion with examples/tutorials all over the internet. Immigrants -> Migrants, voting laws returning to pre-covid rules (and being likened to Jim Crow on Steroids as a result), etc.
There's a segment of society that's in love with renaming/changing things everyone else was fine with, and then when people try to change things back - they're attacked as radical political warmongers.
Nonetheless, even if we were to believe 100% of the people at Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al decided on this change together, it's still a small group of people and it still is a political decision.
One of the reasons why I hesitate to use emojis is that there isn't enough standardization of what they look like. I've seen texts I've written that include them on other devices and have been pretty dismayed that that even relatively minor visual differences can make a huge difference in the meaning I intended vs the meaning that was actually received.
The water pistol/gun thing is this taken to an extreme. The initial change was bad because it introduced a huge amount of uncertainty in meaning. The change back is bad for exactly the same reason.
That's just like, your opinion man! Some of us view it as the Internet healing.
> Some of us
Who is "us"? I said "fresh anonymous accounts" because there's a problem with such on this website. Certain ideas are way more likely with those.
Nonsensical since my account is not a "fresh anonymous account". Fresh accounts are colored green.
>because there's a problem with such on this website.
What's the problem? Wrongthink?
>Certain ideas are way more likely with those.
"Truth is treason in the empire of lies."
Objective, but deeply flawed. Most people around the world are running code updated past a version released in 2018.
Maybe? I mean, Unicode already explicitly does not encode glyphs, but code points. So point 65 is capital Roman “A”, but Unicode says nothing about how it should be displayed.
Going further, certain code points represent characters which Unicode considers “the same” character in Japanese/Chinese/Korean even though they may be different in meaning, pronunciation, and visual appearance. Thus, you need to know which language is being writing before you can pick the correct glyph to put on the screen.
So, while stupid, it doesn’t seem exactly wrong or unprecedented for X to change their glyph from a squirt gun to a pistol.
The representation itself isn't standardized I think, a lot of emojis don't look very similar across different platforms.
There’s no reality that exists where it was dumb so you shouldn’t care it was changed but it’s dumb so it shouldn’t be changed back because it’s dumb right so it doesn’t matter what it is…
The people who changed it thought it mattered, the people changing it back do too so as dumb as it is, I guess it matters to both these groups, even if it is kinda dumb.
These dumbest of political battlegrounds are entirely the problem caused by the people who demanded the initial change, no one cared about this till someone cared about it.
Depends where your sample is from, if you just did a worldwide the result would surprise you.