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Guns Censored by Emoji Police, Apple and Microsoft

cprayingmantis 10y ago
I don't understand how companies can reconcile the fact they want free and open internet where people can express their thoughts and ideas yet make moves to actively restrict expressiveness. When has expression become a bad thing?
- smt88 10y ago
  What can you express with a gun emoji that you can't express better with words? Emojis are jokes/toys/punctuation. They're not a way to express actual ideas.
  - deadowl 10y ago
    Easy, just repeat the gun emoji 21 times and it has plenty of meaning.
  - SamReidHughes 10y ago
    Look at people using them and you'll see they do express actual ideas.
- psychometry 10y ago
  Since when do you think you have a right to expression on entirely private platforms? They have no moral, ethical, or business obligation to provide you an emoji for everything you want to say. You can still use words, you know? There's nothing inconsistent there.
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    The point was not that they don't have the right to do that, but rather that that these companies are hypocritical for advocating "free and open" when it applies to themselves, but then imposing censorship upon their customers at the same time.
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  They don't need to reconcile it. Their messaging never reflected their motivations in the first place. They don't want anyone else to have any power over them when they have to compete. It's not a principled position, it's simply using the closest principle to advocate a self-serving goal. When they're in control, they don't care about upholding principles until it starts impacting sales.
jimrandomh 10y ago
Honestly, I would prefer if emojis in general weren't part of the unicode standard at all. I don't use them, and when others use them in communications with me I find them distasteful. And putting them into Unicode has created a battleground for completely-unnecessary conflicts like this one. If people really want to send each other pictures of olympic sports, can't they just send actual images?
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  If people really want to send each other pictures of olympic sports, can't they just send actual images? Right now emoji is the only way to send content-addressable images in-band. Extending the character set is probably not the best way to do it, but might be the least-worst. Everything else gets very tricky very fast. An alternative can't use fonts to work around the need for a parser somewhere in every GUI stack ever. And that's in addition to figuring out about where and how the images get stored. Is there is an image set to be implemented as a matter of compatibility, is the image embedded in a multipart message wasting bandwidth when the same pictograph is used in more than one message, or is now a connectivity expectation to render otherwise readable-offline material?
  - x1798DE 10y ago
    I kinda feel like this is the sort of thing that would be ideal for a separate, non-unicode standard, like a markup language: <emoji="smiling face" attr="skin-color:yellow"/> It seems like a nasty hack to include pictures of things as code points, since they don't really share much in common with linguistic characters other than that they hold some semantic value.
- intopieces 10y ago
  Unicode doesn't exist to encode only what jimrandomh uses. It exists to encode what people who use it want to convey, including things like archaic Japanese characters used only in names. Take a look at the list of Unicode characters.; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters You will use probably <1% of these in your life. And that's fine. Their job is much bigger than your use-case. And there is no conflict. Unicode still encoded the symbols, they just didn't use them as emoji. Corporations decided not to pick them up either.

I don't understand how companies can reconcile the fact they want free and open internet where people can express their thoughts and ideas yet make moves to actively restrict expressiveness. When has expression become a bad thing?

smt88 10y ago
What can you express with a gun emoji that you can't express better with words? Emojis are jokes/toys/punctuation. They're not a way to express actual ideas.
- deadowl 10y ago
  Easy, just repeat the gun emoji 21 times and it has plenty of meaning.
- SamReidHughes 10y ago
  Look at people using them and you'll see they do express actual ideas.
psychometry 10y ago
Since when do you think you have a right to expression on entirely private platforms? They have no moral, ethical, or business obligation to provide you an emoji for everything you want to say. You can still use words, you know? There's nothing inconsistent there.
- pjlegato 10y ago
  The point was not that they don't have the right to do that, but rather that that these companies are hypocritical for advocating "free and open" when it applies to themselves, but then imposing censorship upon their customers at the same time.
forgottenpass 10y ago
They don't need to reconcile it. Their messaging never reflected their motivations in the first place. They don't want anyone else to have any power over them when they have to compete. It's not a principled position, it's simply using the closest principle to advocate a self-serving goal. When they're in control, they don't care about upholding principles until it starts impacting sales.

jimrandomh 10y ago

Honestly, I would prefer if emojis in general weren't part of the unicode standard at all. I don't use them, and when others use them in communications with me I find them distasteful. And putting them into Unicode has created a battleground for completely-unnecessary conflicts like this one. If people really want to send each other pictures of olympic sports, can't they just send actual images?

forgottenpass 10y ago
If people really want to send each other pictures of olympic sports, can't they just send actual images? Right now emoji is the only way to send content-addressable images in-band. Extending the character set is probably not the best way to do it, but might be the least-worst. Everything else gets very tricky very fast. An alternative can't use fonts to work around the need for a parser somewhere in every GUI stack ever. And that's in addition to figuring out about where and how the images get stored. Is there is an image set to be implemented as a matter of compatibility, is the image embedded in a multipart message wasting bandwidth when the same pictograph is used in more than one message, or is now a connectivity expectation to render otherwise readable-offline material?
- x1798DE 10y ago
  I kinda feel like this is the sort of thing that would be ideal for a separate, non-unicode standard, like a markup language: <emoji="smiling face" attr="skin-color:yellow"/> It seems like a nasty hack to include pictures of things as code points, since they don't really share much in common with linguistic characters other than that they hold some semantic value.
intopieces 10y ago
Unicode doesn't exist to encode only what jimrandomh uses. It exists to encode what people who use it want to convey, including things like archaic Japanese characters used only in names. Take a look at the list of Unicode characters.; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters You will use probably <1% of these in your life. And that's fine. Their job is much bigger than your use-case. And there is no conflict. Unicode still encoded the symbols, they just didn't use them as emoji. Corporations decided not to pick them up either.