AFAICT, the entire "Gen Z finds thumbs up passive aggressive" is fake news; it got started somewhere, and then copy/pasted across news sites with nobody doing a

AFAICT, the entire "Gen Z finds thumbs up passive aggressive" is fake news; it got started somewhere, and then copy/pasted across news sites with nobody doing an ounce of journalistic fact checking. E.g., this chain [1] → [2] → [3] chains back to the Reddit post ([3]) which has a grand total of … 26 upvotes (on the day the Today article is written)? … and AFAICT, the reddit post is what kicks off the news copypastafest. That's not a reliable source to then label an entire generation. "Journalists" getting their "facts" from r/Adulting … sigh. (Note that your NYPost article falls, chronologically, between [1] and [2], and note the dates on them all. There's a few other citations in the Today post … like an employee at Today, tweets, (it must have been a rather slow week) … and a (different) NYPost article whose citation is … the same Reddit post! The closet we get is then a jump to a Yahoo article which claims an unsourced survey for its data.) (AFAICT talking to people, everyone I've seen who thinks this is a thing appears to think such because they've encountered these news posts / reposts of this, not because they genuinely hold the belief themselves. Self-fulfilling prophecy, at this point. Though now that I've invoked a weird form of Cunningham's Law, I'm sure someone will tell me they're the one, and that there are dozens of them out there. Tell me why you can't just read :+1: in an "assume best intent" light and treat it as the literal "ack/agree/yes" that it's probably meant as, and what, you want me to spam everyone with reply notifications instead of just a reaction…?) (There is also an episode of Dr. Phil out there that goes into how a bunch of emoji are supposedly poisoned one way or another, again with nary a citation to most of it, or they're saying "X emoji is ruined" where, no, it's only ruined if you use it in a particular context where the meaning of the emoji isn't the original meaning, but rather the context puns it to something else. Cf. the eggplant emoji.) [1]: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2022/10/28/gen-z-thumbs-up-emoji-passive-aggressive-red-heart-laugh-cry-canceled/ https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2022/10/28/gen-z-thumbs-up-... [2]: https://www.today.com/news/news/thumbs-up-emoji-debate-rcna52089 https://www.today.com/news/news/thumbs-up-emoji-debate-rcna5... [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221013050626/https://www.reddit.com/r/Adulting/comments/rhie1e/am_i_not_adult_enough_to_be_comfortable_with_the/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221013050626/https://www.reddi...