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Apple started it. For a time, a text like this: > Let’s meet at the park [pistol emoji] Would have have very different meanings between platforms. Eventually
by surround 7y ago
Apple started it. For a time, a text like this:
> Let’s meet at the park [pistol emoji]
Would have have very different meanings between platforms.
Eventually, all platforms followed Apple and switched to the water pistol. (The ones that still show real pistols are obsolete fonts.)
https://emojipedia.org/pistol https://emojipedia.org/pistol
At this point, Apple gets to decide what emojis look like, not the Unicode Consortium.
- ygra 7y agoUnicode doesn't decide anything about character appearance. Unicode is just about giving a character a number (among other interesting things for text, like collation, bidirectional text, etc.).
- michaelt 7y agoIf Unicode issue a standard naming U+1F49A as 'Green Heart' and all major platforms implement a green heart, I'd say unicode decided something about character appearance :)
- mantap 7y agoApple spearheaded this but you could imagine Facebook spearheading it and everybody else following. Honestly the original gun emoji was simply a bad idea because it makes it hard to make apps that are age-rated for small children when there's a fricking gun in the system keyboard.
- read_if_gay_ 7y agoI don't understand how "there's a fricking gun in the system keyboard" => "hard to make apps that are age-rated for small children". It's just a tiny picture of a gun, hidden in a pile of hundreds of emojis at that. Where's the problem?
- hydgv 7y agoIt was quite literally leftist virtue signalling. A way for those companies to say "I support gun control".
- nightcracker 7y agoI support gun control but do not support the censorship in emojis. So I don't know about that.
- surround 7y agoThere’s also the knife, bomb, cigarette, and middle finger emojis. And Apple decided to keep the peach emoji looking like a butt: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/apple-brings-back-the-peach-butt-emoji/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/apple-brings-back-the-peac...
- michaelt 7y agoIf you're making such an app, you'd be filtering the content for obscenities anyway. I mean, Unicode already includes a swastika character [1]. Wouldn't you just add the gun emoji to your list of censored words and emojis? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika#Written_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika#Written_characters
- shard 7y agoPer your link, the swastika is a religious symbol for a large number of people for a long time. It's strange to suggest that it is an obscenity just because a small number of people used it to mean something bad.
- anonymfus 7y agoHaving a character in the system font does not mean having it on the system keyboard.
- LyndsySimon 7y agoWhy? I’m a youth firearms instructor - are you saying that any app that contains so much as an icon shaped like a gun is inappropriate for children?