8 ms·

Emoji are showing up as evidence in court more frequently

86 points by nolawi89 8y ago

notimetorelax 8y ago
I frequently use the greening teeth emoji on my iPhone as a negative. Now I know that my Android addressees interpret this as positive.
- cringeCollector 8y ago
  Yeah, I have always interpretted that particular emoji as wincing in pain, like, "ouch, how incredibly awkward" as if the person were grimacing, or cringing at someone else embarassing themselves. That's what the face looks like. Abivalent schadenfreude, halfway to laughing at the expense of others. At best, it reads like laughing at someone who accepts a painful dare, like eating an incredibly spicy pepper and then laughing as they choke and cough and cry from the spice and heat.
  - Ndymium 8y ago
    Which emoji are you specifically talking about? There is the grimacing one: https://emojipedia.org/grimacing-face/ https://emojipedia.org/grimacing-face/ But also a grinning one: https://emojipedia.org/grinning-face-with-smiling-eyes/ https://emojipedia.org/grinning-face-with-smiling-eyes/ Unfortunately the latter one used to look like the former one on iOS 6.0: https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-6.0/grinning-face-with-smiling-eyes/ https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-6.0/grinning-face-with-smil... This may be causing the confusion. EDIT: HN doesn't support emoji apparently.
    - saltySwab 8y ago
      It doesn't matter because the vast, vast, vast majority of people lack any sort of technical nuance to negotiate such mild differences in a rush. As pedantic as the viewer's interpretation may be, the author in any sort of emoji context, is moving fast, to snipe the conversation, just to get a word in, edgewise. And with soft keyboards, touch typing is non-existent, and adjacent, similar smiley faces get used way, way, way more loosely than abbreviated initialisms (omg r u srs 2???) or typos (your and awesome person) so, to mince emojis as highly specific in meaning is silly. Half of all emoji usage is drunk dials. The other half is precision cyber bullying and organized crime. Only the margin of error is left to be considered as conveyed in earnest by the sober minded, prudent and cautious fellow citizens we share the road with. My grandma can't tell the difference. My mom can't tell the difference. My dad doesn't care. My kindergartener just likes them all. 90% of the world isn't equipped to parse mojis in strict mode, but that doesn't mean their emoji use won't be strictly consumed and observed after the fact.
      - yoz-y 8y ago
        > And with soft keyboards, touch typing is non-existent I have to disagree here. Touch typing in the sense of feeling the keys is of course impossible but it is quite common to type on the phone without looking at the keyboard and without mistakes. > Half of all emoji usage is drunk dials. The other half is precision cyber bullying and organized crime. Only the margin of error is left to be considered as conveyed in earnest by the sober minded, prudent and cautious fellow citizens we share the road with. I curate my Twitter follows quite heavily and the few people I have there use emojis quite a lot and with obvious deliberation. I know it's popular to hate on emoji but looking down on all people using them is not useful.
      - jobigoud 8y ago
        I use emojis in instant messaging with my wife. We use these two emojis sometimes, as a single message to express a state of mind, they have very specific meaning and are not confused. In addition to regular conversation we have a shared vocabulary of maybe a dozen emojis to express things that can't be put into words easily or is more effective as a single character. Over time we also developed alternate meaning for some of them. I was an emoji/emoticon skeptic for a long time but I came to realize they can encode a lot of information.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  There's one very popular emoji I particularly hate: https://emojipedia.org/face-with-tears-of-joy/ https://emojipedia.org/face-with-tears-of-joy/. Why? Because a) it looks bad (one of the worst made emojis out there), and b) when someone sends it to me, I have no clue what they mean. While it's technically "crying with joy", it also resembles crying with despair - and with regular people, who don't even know what "emoji" is or that they have names, I can't be 100% sure which interpretation they picked.
  - jobigoud 8y ago
    It has a big smile. How would you interpret this as despair?
    - huffmsa 8y ago
      Cultural or psychological differences in interpreting facial expressions. It's clearly not despair to me. The mouth is upturned, which indicates smiling. But to someone who can't easily differentiate upturned from downturned, it might be despair.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        In blown-up version like this it's easier to see the upturn. In smaller renderings, like in Facebook & Google products on my desktop and on the phone (or pixelated copy-pastes of it on top of Facebook videos), the rendering sits squarely in the uncanny valley for me. It looks like smiling, but then it looks also like the face is in great pain, with all the muscles contracted, squeezing tears out of its tear ducts.
        huffmsa 8y ago
        I suppose the guy who I'm responding to is expecting you to be familiar enough with the full selection of emoji to know that it's definitely the tears of joy emoji and that there isn't a nearly identical one for despair. It'd be a poor design decision if there were. But it's also unreasonable to expect everyone to think like a good interaction designer.
huffmsa 8y ago
> After sending an enthusiastic text confirming that they wanted the apartment, Anyone who sends little yellow men as part of a business conversation deserves whatever misfortune befalls them. Anyone who conducts a business conversation over any medium but snail mail, fax, email or the phone deserves whatever misfortune befalls them. I know this is old-fashioned, but business is business, personal is personal.
- ecmascript 8y ago
  Aren't you being a bit negative here?
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    Not in the slightest. I am, however, demonstrating that I was raised by lawyers and writers. As a point of clarification, I'm all for emoji men and gifs in personal communication. I'm probably the biggest giphy user in any given slack group, but only once I feel comfortable with the other channel participants. One of the first things I do is install the cult of the party parrot emoji pack. But for any communication with outside parties, or where money is on the table, there is no place for emoji, as they're too imprecise.
    - Zak 8y ago
      Certainly, including emoji in say... a contract negotiation could introduce unwanted ambiguity, but that's absolutely not an argument against using text-based messaging platforms for that purpose. Instead, the fact that misunderstandings could be costly is an argument for using precise language for those kinds of discussions regardless of media.
- amelius 8y ago
  > I know this is old-fashioned, but business is business, personal is personal. People are mixing the personal domain and business all the time. For example: in business meetings, people smile and they tell jokes; also, business people often go out for dinner together.
midgetjones 8y ago
Emoji have really filled a gap, where words typed on the internet were missing some context of how they are supposed to be read. And nowadays, whether or not I add the eggplant emoji to the end of a whatsapp message can really change how it's interpreted, and gives me less to excuse myself should it come up in court. But really, anything that removes doubt and clarity from a conversation has got to be a good thing. How many internet arguments have been spared because someone could attach a winky face to show that they were being impish and not to take offence? Obviously, old people hate them, but I can see emoji melding into all forms of language in the future. Or even the global language :thinking-face:
- ddeokbokki 8y ago
  People will argue that you should be able to convey your message clearly in plain English but those people don't realise that: - Not everyone masters English (even when it's your mother tongue, not everyone has access to the same education to be able to use it perfectly) - Languages are complex, we don't talk with words only, we use facial expressions and gestures, emojis help mimic those when only words are available.
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    If you have the time to consider what you're going to say, like in written communication, then yes, you should be able to do it with just words. Take your time, figure out what you want to say.
    - adriand 8y ago
      Most emoji could likely be replaced with, "And when I say that, I mean it in an X way", where X equals "humourous", "joking", "angry", "flirtatious", etc. Which would be incredibly tedious. Consider that when you read something with dialogue, e.g. a novel, the author will frequently utilize descriptive words to indicate the tone of the dialogue. E.g. '"You're not going anywhere," he snarled.' As such, a way to indicate tone using just words exists - it's just clumsy to do that for your own statements.
anoncake 8y ago
> Despite the potential for emoji to be interpreted in a wide array of ways, emoji experts don’t really exist. “Emoji usually have dialects. They draw meaning from their context. You could absolutely talk about emoji as a phenomenon, but as for what a particular emoji means, you probably wouldn’t go to a linguist. You would probably go to someone who’s familiar with that community, just like they did with the sex trafficking case,” Goldman says. What does Goldman think linguists do when they research the meaning of words?
- cookieswumchorr 8y ago
  emojis are not something strictly defined. They vary across messaging platforms and clients, or versions of clients. Sometimes it means that the person sending them sees a different image then the recepient, which also can lead do different interpretation
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    I'm reminded of the UK PM, David Cameron, who signed many emails "LOL". He though it meant 'lots of love'.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - anoncake 8y ago
    The meaning of words also differs between dialects and even idiolects. If you ask one person what an emoji means, chances are they will tell you how they interpret it.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
It should always be taken with a grain of salt; I guess you can make sweeping statements like "positive/negative tone", but you should be careful attributing exact meanings to it. I mean to some, an eggplant is an eggplant, to others it's a penis. There will be community specific meanings attributed to certain emoji, often unspoken or even unaware.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Just like with words, or colors, or mostly any kind of element of communication.
sct202 8y ago
My friend went bankrupt and a bunch of us had loaned him a little money as a stop gap, and he submitted our Facebook messages as screenshots as proof of the debt he owed us.

86 points by nolawi89 8y ago

I frequently use the greening teeth emoji on my iPhone as a negative. Now I know that my Android addressees interpret this as positive.

cringeCollector 8y ago
Yeah, I have always interpretted that particular emoji as wincing in pain, like, "ouch, how incredibly awkward" as if the person were grimacing, or cringing at someone else embarassing themselves. That's what the face looks like. Abivalent schadenfreude, halfway to laughing at the expense of others. At best, it reads like laughing at someone who accepts a painful dare, like eating an incredibly spicy pepper and then laughing as they choke and cough and cry from the spice and heat.
- Ndymium 8y ago
  Which emoji are you specifically talking about? There is the grimacing one: https://emojipedia.org/grimacing-face/ https://emojipedia.org/grimacing-face/ But also a grinning one: https://emojipedia.org/grinning-face-with-smiling-eyes/ https://emojipedia.org/grinning-face-with-smiling-eyes/ Unfortunately the latter one used to look like the former one on iOS 6.0: https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-6.0/grinning-face-with-smiling-eyes/ https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-6.0/grinning-face-with-smil... This may be causing the confusion. EDIT: HN doesn't support emoji apparently.
  - saltySwab 8y ago
    It doesn't matter because the vast, vast, vast majority of people lack any sort of technical nuance to negotiate such mild differences in a rush. As pedantic as the viewer's interpretation may be, the author in any sort of emoji context, is moving fast, to snipe the conversation, just to get a word in, edgewise. And with soft keyboards, touch typing is non-existent, and adjacent, similar smiley faces get used way, way, way more loosely than abbreviated initialisms (omg r u srs 2???) or typos (your and awesome person) so, to mince emojis as highly specific in meaning is silly. Half of all emoji usage is drunk dials. The other half is precision cyber bullying and organized crime. Only the margin of error is left to be considered as conveyed in earnest by the sober minded, prudent and cautious fellow citizens we share the road with. My grandma can't tell the difference. My mom can't tell the difference. My dad doesn't care. My kindergartener just likes them all. 90% of the world isn't equipped to parse mojis in strict mode, but that doesn't mean their emoji use won't be strictly consumed and observed after the fact.
    - yoz-y 8y ago
      > And with soft keyboards, touch typing is non-existent I have to disagree here. Touch typing in the sense of feeling the keys is of course impossible but it is quite common to type on the phone without looking at the keyboard and without mistakes. > Half of all emoji usage is drunk dials. The other half is precision cyber bullying and organized crime. Only the margin of error is left to be considered as conveyed in earnest by the sober minded, prudent and cautious fellow citizens we share the road with. I curate my Twitter follows quite heavily and the few people I have there use emojis quite a lot and with obvious deliberation. I know it's popular to hate on emoji but looking down on all people using them is not useful.
    - jobigoud 8y ago
      I use emojis in instant messaging with my wife. We use these two emojis sometimes, as a single message to express a state of mind, they have very specific meaning and are not confused. In addition to regular conversation we have a shared vocabulary of maybe a dozen emojis to express things that can't be put into words easily or is more effective as a single character. Over time we also developed alternate meaning for some of them. I was an emoji/emoticon skeptic for a long time but I came to realize they can encode a lot of information.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
There's one very popular emoji I particularly hate: https://emojipedia.org/face-with-tears-of-joy/ https://emojipedia.org/face-with-tears-of-joy/. Why? Because a) it looks bad (one of the worst made emojis out there), and b) when someone sends it to me, I have no clue what they mean. While it's technically "crying with joy", it also resembles crying with despair - and with regular people, who don't even know what "emoji" is or that they have names, I can't be 100% sure which interpretation they picked.
- jobigoud 8y ago
  It has a big smile. How would you interpret this as despair?
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    Cultural or psychological differences in interpreting facial expressions. It's clearly not despair to me. The mouth is upturned, which indicates smiling. But to someone who can't easily differentiate upturned from downturned, it might be despair.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      In blown-up version like this it's easier to see the upturn. In smaller renderings, like in Facebook & Google products on my desktop and on the phone (or pixelated copy-pastes of it on top of Facebook videos), the rendering sits squarely in the uncanny valley for me. It looks like smiling, but then it looks also like the face is in great pain, with all the muscles contracted, squeezing tears out of its tear ducts.
      - huffmsa 8y ago
        I suppose the guy who I'm responding to is expecting you to be familiar enough with the full selection of emoji to know that it's definitely the tears of joy emoji and that there isn't a nearly identical one for despair. It'd be a poor design decision if there were. But it's also unreasonable to expect everyone to think like a good interaction designer.

huffmsa 8y ago

> After sending an enthusiastic text confirming that they wanted the apartment, Anyone who sends little yellow men as part of a business conversation deserves whatever misfortune befalls them. Anyone who conducts a business conversation over any medium but snail mail, fax, email or the phone deserves whatever misfortune befalls them. I know this is old-fashioned, but business is business, personal is personal.

ecmascript 8y ago
Aren't you being a bit negative here?
- huffmsa 8y ago
  Not in the slightest. I am, however, demonstrating that I was raised by lawyers and writers. As a point of clarification, I'm all for emoji men and gifs in personal communication. I'm probably the biggest giphy user in any given slack group, but only once I feel comfortable with the other channel participants. One of the first things I do is install the cult of the party parrot emoji pack. But for any communication with outside parties, or where money is on the table, there is no place for emoji, as they're too imprecise.
  - Zak 8y ago
    Certainly, including emoji in say... a contract negotiation could introduce unwanted ambiguity, but that's absolutely not an argument against using text-based messaging platforms for that purpose. Instead, the fact that misunderstandings could be costly is an argument for using precise language for those kinds of discussions regardless of media.
amelius 8y ago
> I know this is old-fashioned, but business is business, personal is personal. People are mixing the personal domain and business all the time. For example: in business meetings, people smile and they tell jokes; also, business people often go out for dinner together.

midgetjones 8y ago

Emoji have really filled a gap, where words typed on the internet were missing some context of how they are supposed to be read. And nowadays, whether or not I add the eggplant emoji to the end of a whatsapp message can really change how it's interpreted, and gives me less to excuse myself should it come up in court. But really, anything that removes doubt and clarity from a conversation has got to be a good thing. How many internet arguments have been spared because someone could attach a winky face to show that they were being impish and not to take offence? Obviously, old people hate them, but I can see emoji melding into all forms of language in the future. Or even the global language :thinking-face:

ddeokbokki 8y ago
People will argue that you should be able to convey your message clearly in plain English but those people don't realise that: - Not everyone masters English (even when it's your mother tongue, not everyone has access to the same education to be able to use it perfectly) - Languages are complex, we don't talk with words only, we use facial expressions and gestures, emojis help mimic those when only words are available.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  If you have the time to consider what you're going to say, like in written communication, then yes, you should be able to do it with just words. Take your time, figure out what you want to say.
  - adriand 8y ago
    Most emoji could likely be replaced with, "And when I say that, I mean it in an X way", where X equals "humourous", "joking", "angry", "flirtatious", etc. Which would be incredibly tedious. Consider that when you read something with dialogue, e.g. a novel, the author will frequently utilize descriptive words to indicate the tone of the dialogue. E.g. '"You're not going anywhere," he snarled.' As such, a way to indicate tone using just words exists - it's just clumsy to do that for your own statements.

anoncake 8y ago

> Despite the potential for emoji to be interpreted in a wide array of ways, emoji experts don’t really exist. “Emoji usually have dialects. They draw meaning from their context. You could absolutely talk about emoji as a phenomenon, but as for what a particular emoji means, you probably wouldn’t go to a linguist. You would probably go to someone who’s familiar with that community, just like they did with the sex trafficking case,” Goldman says. What does Goldman think linguists do when they research the meaning of words?

cookieswumchorr 8y ago
emojis are not something strictly defined. They vary across messaging platforms and clients, or versions of clients. Sometimes it means that the person sending them sees a different image then the recepient, which also can lead do different interpretation
- sandworm101 8y ago
  I'm reminded of the UK PM, David Cameron, who signed many emails "LOL". He though it meant 'lots of love'.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- anoncake 8y ago
  The meaning of words also differs between dialects and even idiolects. If you ask one person what an emoji means, chances are they will tell you how they interpret it.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

It should always be taken with a grain of salt; I guess you can make sweeping statements like "positive/negative tone", but you should be careful attributing exact meanings to it. I mean to some, an eggplant is an eggplant, to others it's a penis. There will be community specific meanings attributed to certain emoji, often unspoken or even unaware.

icebraining 8y ago
Just like with words, or colors, or mostly any kind of element of communication.

sct202 8y ago

My friend went bankrupt and a bunch of us had loaned him a little money as a stop gap, and he submitted our Facebook messages as screenshots as proof of the debt he owed us.