X/Twitter’s decision to revert to a gun emoji after replacing it with a water pistol in 2018 was announced without an official explanation. The change comes as major platforms like Google, Facebook, and Apple have opted for a less violent emoji, a water pistol. The Unicode Consortium, the body that governs emoji standards, also changed the name of the gun emoji to “water pistol,” following this trend of visual “de-escalation.”
X/Twitter adds fuel to the fire
The change, reported by Emojipediaspecifies that the water gun emoji had been a constant on Twitter before this change. On July 18, the day after World Emoji Day, the social network posted this new version of the gun visual, which did not fail to immediately provoke debates within the community. This return of the firearm emoji also comes after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, an event that pushed Elon Musk to openly support the former American president in the upcoming election.
This decision raises a number of questions about the motivations of X/Twitter and its CEO. The return of the gun emoji could be interpreted as an alignment with the platform’s right-wing fringe, despite the implications in terms of perception of violence.
An X/Twitter user, @yacineMTB, who identifies himself as a software engineer, claimed responsibility for the change in a tweet from Emojipedia, adding that the current version of the emoji is not final and that they plan to make it ” plus badass ” This statement, far from appeasing critics, has intensified the debate on the relevance of this modification.
update announcement
on x dot com (the website), the gun emoji was returned back into its rightful form: an m1911— kache (@yacineMTB) July 18, 2024
In practice, the gun emoji already appears in X/Twitter’s web client, but not yet on the mobile versions of the app, which use the native iOS and Android emoji sets. This means that users currently see different representations of the emoji depending on the platform they’re using, but that could change once updates roll out to the mobile apps.
The reintroduction of the gun emoji on the social network comes amid growing concerns about gun violence in the United States, and the move is sure to fuel tensions and spark backlash from groups advocating for reduced gun violence and gun control.
Source: www.journaldugeek.com
