It's OK to use emoji's for people you know well, just like it's OK to use inside jokes with them. The problem starts when you are communicating with people out

It's OK to use emoji's for people you know well, just like it's OK to use inside jokes with them. The problem starts when you are communicating with people outside your cultural circle. There is no dictionary for emojis. For example, take the unicode symbol U+1F346 AUBERGINE. My native language contains a lot of french words so I know immediately what it means. For many English speakers that must be translated to egg plant, and even then there will be some people (especially nonnative speakers) who have never seen one. It seems just a harmless emoji for some vegetable, but that is not how it is frequently used.