Emoji evidence errors don’t undo a murder conviction (blog.ericgoldman.org)

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

The issues with emojis go much deeper than this. Even if we agree on how exactly they displayed, their social meaning is highly dependent on the context of a conversation. Instead of allowing outside investigators to divine their own meanings and introduce them as evidence, courts should insist on testimony from the person or people those communications were meant for. If said people give wildly differing testimony to what investigators think is truthful, then they can go down the rabbit hole of how the codepoints were displayed and whatnot.

Lawyers in getting paid to debate their guess of meanings of emojis shocker.

> he argues the court should have excluded a Facebook message that

OT: Don't use Facebook or anything by that company.

> instead of being followed by two emojis, the message is followed by four closely-spaced rectangles. Neither the text of Delarosa’s in limine motion, nor anything said during the in limine hearing would have informed the trial court that the four rectangles represented two emojis

So I know nothing about this trial and have limited knowledge of the US legal system, but didn't one party just misrepresent evidence here? They would probably argue that it wasn't intentional and thus not perjury, but it still sounds pretty serious. The emojis are just as much part of the message as the latin characters

I have noticed that men and women tend to use different emoji and ascribe different meaning to them. Ex. I see the skull emoji used to indicate laughter more often used by women and crying face used more by men.

There are some tribes where men and women have completely different languages, I wonder if we will end up that way with emojis.

Given it was not directly brought up in the motion in limine, it sounds like there were other concerns with the message anyway?

> it’s possible/probable that the trial outcomes would have been the same with or without the Facebook message evidence.

The year is 2025 and the courts are debating "emoji evidence." That is where we are as a species.

i love how after having actual law professionals take a look at his appraisal, he has to retract all the things he said about law, leaving you with how he noticed emjois werent rendered on a printout. typical internet know nothing

As a side note, the FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY emoji doesn’t actually depict tears of joy, but laughing so hard that tears come out of your eyes.

In the same vein was an incident where an improperly localized phone in Turkey caused a sent message to arrive with different characters, with very different meaning, and the fallout was two deaths [1], discussed here [2]

[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758

Illustrating another facet of problems with emojis and icons. For example, an image of a duck. Is it meant to be a duck, a goose, a pigeon, or a bird? Don't you love that ancient oil lamp icon that is supposed to mean "oil pressure"? Unlike words, you cannot even look up the definition of an emoji or icon.

Icon based written languages have been replaced over time with phonetic ones. There's a good reason for that. Icons and emoji don't work.

Constantly inventing new ones and adding them to Unicode is simply retarded.

There, I said it!!

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> For example, my software renders the smiling face with horns as red [], but often the depiction is purple.

It seems the article is ironically falling for the same problem. This would be worked around by including images of the emoji variants, rather than relying on Unicode.

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