> That is like saying that replacing the car emoji with a train car is changing it from a ‘car’ to a ‘car.’ A squirt gun is not at all the same thing as a pisto

> That is like saying that replacing the car emoji with a train car is changing it from a ‘car’ to a ‘car.’ A squirt gun is not at all the same thing as a pistol In the context of human conversation via emojis (which is a very specialized subset of communication), can you give me an example of a scenario where the semantic meaning of a sentence is going to change significantly by the gun emoji being a squirt gun instead of a pistol? I mean this in good faith, I can't think of a reasonable scenario outside of something like: Alice: "911, what's your emergency?" Bob: "Help, I"m being threatened" Alice: "What are you being threatened with?" Bob: "" (edit: I pasted https://emojipedia.org/pistol https://emojipedia.org/pistol in here, but of course HN didn't render it) > > Am I "manipulating my son's thoughts and culture" by choosing when I intentionally expose him to profanity? > Yes, and it’s good because you are your son’s father. If you were right, I would dispute that me being a child's father gives me exclusive rights to manipulate their thoughts and culture so it's a good thing. They are an independent human being. I could use my power and influence to enstill obedience to a cult (aka, religion), or teach them racism. It might take them decades to deprogram themselves, if they ever do so at all. But I don't think you're right. Keeping profanity out of my son's brain until he grows out of the "repeat everything he hears especially if it gets a reaction" phase is no different than not giving him a gun before he can grow up to be a responsible gun owner. And conversely, just because I am failing to keep profanity out of his mouth (obviously - most kids at some point figure out potty language and how fun ti is to repeat) doesn't automatically mean he's going to grow up a profane sailor. Likewise, I don't know if my 5-year-old will grow up to be a responsible gun owner, a conscientious objector to weapons, or a mass shooter. But I do know that his fate will not be decided by whether he sees a water pistol or a bullet pistol in the gun emoji on the internet. > Apple is not anyone’s father, and does not have that right over its customers. And customers aren't citizens. Apple may have a pretty large market share, but it is in no ways a monopoly. It is trivial to avoid Apple products in your life. If the concern is that they used their power to influence the rest of the tech industry and the Unicode consortium, I mean the list of things like that is infinite. All modern web standards are shaped by tech companies, large and small. The issue isn't that someone CAN influence a consortium, the issue is that you disagree with the decision. And I can understand if this was a threat to free expression or culture, but the list of emojis is already curated and influenced by the artists. I'm still curious of an answer to this BTW: > how does replacing a gun emoji with a squirt gun help make their case or in any way weaken the 2nd amendment? I don't think it says anything about not infringing on rights to a gun emoji?