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Emoji evidence errors don’t undo a murder conviction
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hed 1y agoIt's interesting because like the article says legal teams may have to get smarter about recreating all the context when evidence like this is used. Even if the emojis rendered the reference implementation of Unicode and what vendors actually represent can vary quite a bit by platform or OS version.
- criddell 1y agoI recently listened to some podcast where they talked about this in the context of threatening texts. Sending someone a gun emoji communicates a very different thing if it shows up as a water pistol vs a realistic looking gun. The court need to see what the sender thought they were sending and what the receiver saw. https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolution_of_the_gun_emoji/ https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolutio...
- trollbridge 1y agoAn obvious problem is Apple renders the firearm emoji as a water pistol, and everyone else renders it as an actual pistol.
- debugnik 1y agoAccording to Wikipedia, now Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, WhatsApp and Facebook all use a water pistol. X was the only platform to roll that back.
- madcaptenor 1y agoAlso IIRC there are some renderings where the firearm is aimed to the left and others aim it to the right. I'm having trouble sourcing this though - maybe this was true in the past or it was some other emoji that implies a direction.
- internetter 1y agoAll vendor's guns have always aimed at the left, however there are plenty of discrepancies, collectively referred to as "emoji fragmentation" https://blog.emojipedia.org/2018-the-year-of-emoji-convergence/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/2018-the-year-of-emoji-convergen...
- microtherion 1y agoTheoretically, there's a mechanism in Unicode allowing you to aim left and right: https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Direction https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Direction But I don't think it's implemented widely, if anywhere.
- aidenn0 1y agoAndroid changed in 2018 -- which adds even more of an issue since serious cases can take many years to go to trial, what it looks like on a phone today might be totally different than what it looked like on a phone at the time of the crime.
- pxc 1y agoAll the big tech companies except Twitter now render it as a squirt gun afaik
- hamdingers 1y agoAlmost everyone renders a water pistol now: https://emojipedia.org/pistol https://emojipedia.org/pistol (click the "designs" tab) Twitter/X is the only major exception, and they only changed it to represent a realistic gun recently.
- derefr 1y agoInterestingly, this seems to be a pattern — in cases where the other providers are depicting an emoji “per the spec” but one provider is doing something unusual, the unusual depiction almost always spreads to fixation among the other providers. For example, “loudly crying face” (https://emojipedia.org/loudly-crying-face https://emojipedia.org/loudly-crying-face) was literally supposed to just be a kind of mouth-open bawling expression. And that’s how everyone did it… except Apple. Apple gave their version a weirdly mixed expression that people sometimes interpret as “crying while laughing because something is so funny” (even though there’s already a separate emoji for that.) And iOS users kept using this emoji to mean that, while everyone else was confused. But instead of Apple fixing their emoji, everyone else gradually changed their depictions to conform to Apple’s non-standard interpretation. (Seriously, look at the history for each provider in the above link.)
- RandallBrown 1y agoI dunno, the SoftBank emoji from 25 years ago is pretty much the same face as Apple's is now. https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2000/loudly-crying-face https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2000/loudly-crying-face
- doublerabbit 1y ago"The SoftBank emoji designs heavily influenced Apple's original emoji font which was designed to be compatible with this set when launching in Japan, due to iPhone being a SoftBank-exclusive phone when first released." Would be why.
- linkregister 1y ago> Apple gave their version a weirdly mixed expression that people sometimes interpret as “crying while laughing because something is so funny” (even though there’s already a separate emoji for that.) And iOS users kept using this emoji to mean that, while everyone else was confused. This sounds like a small social media niche being interpreted as representative overall. The first 10 search engine results were people primarily interpreting it as a crying/sadness emotion; some used it as an expression of general intense emotion. This seems consistent with actual crying, which can be a reaction to many different intense emotions, not just sadness.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoWhat is it these days that perfectly normal words and things get censored? As far as harmful social phenomena go this is very small, but it's so silly.
- psunavy03 1y agoBecause there's a concerted effort to "denormalize" and stigmatize the perfectly legitimate activity of owning a firearm for lawful purposes like hunting, collecting, and sport shooting. Just one more front in the culture wars.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoI don't agree. It's more like an extreme fear of causing offence, which is one of the greatest crimes any public official or company can commit in todays day and age. You can definitely fit it in to the ongoing war against culture, but you are reaching a bit. I can't even blame Big Tech for it. It probably makes them more profit to be proactively timid. When that stops being true so will they.
- akimbostrawman 1y ago>You can definitely fit it in to the ongoing war against culture, but you are reaching a bit. Why would it be a reach when you yourself acknowledge it. >It's more like an extreme fear of causing offence, which is one of the greatest crimes Its pretty clear that the left leaning tech world is using it either way for there agenda.
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y agoYes. I wouldn't call that emoji "tears with joy" I would calling it "laughing so much you have tears".
- chuckadams 1y agoTo say nothing of the eyes and smile on U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO which kind of made it more disturbing.
- mindslight 1y agoThe issues with emojis go much deeper than this. Even if we agree on how exactly they displayed, their social meaning is highly dependent on the context of a conversation. Instead of allowing outside investigators to divine their own meanings and introduce them as evidence, courts should insist on testimony from the person or people those communications were meant for. If said people give wildly differing testimony to what investigators think is truthful, then they can go down the rabbit hole of how the codepoints were displayed and whatnot.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- qingcharles 1y agoOne tricky aspect of this is if the messages are from the defendant then the defendant is almost certainly going to use their right not to testify (especially if they are actually guilty) as they'll be asked all sorts of other difficult questions they likely won't want to answer.
- potato3732842 1y agoThe state has been using this trick since forever. They don't even need to have written correspondance to misconstrue, they do it all the time with just testimony.
- postexitus 1y agoSame with everyday language. We just got used to its nuances.
- SiempreViernes 1y agoYeah, the novel bit here is only that the lógos displayed to the different parties can be materially different for technical reasons unrelated to the intent of either party. The rest is bog-standard ambiguity of language.
- kstrauser 1y ago
- philipallstar 1y agoLawyers in getting paid to debate their guess of meanings of emojis shocker.
- ekjhgkejhgk 1y ago> he argues the court should have excluded a Facebook message that OT: Don't use Facebook or anything by that company.
- wongarsu 1y ago> instead of being followed by two emojis, the message is followed by four closely-spaced rectangles. Neither the text of Delarosa’s in limine motion, nor anything said during the in limine hearing would have informed the trial court that the four rectangles represented two emojis So I know nothing about this trial and have limited knowledge of the US legal system, but didn't one party just misrepresent evidence here? They would probably argue that it wasn't intentional and thus not perjury, but it still sounds pretty serious. The emojis are just as much part of the message as the latin characters
- aidenn0 1y agoIf I understand TFA right, it was the defense that made the mistake, which is why the appeal failed. You don't get a do-over when the mistake is on your side.
- j-bos 1y agoI thought you would if you prove your lawyer was incompetent and sue them?
- Satisfy4400 1y agoThe defendant could raise an "ineffective assistance of counsel" argument, asserting his counsel was incompetent and it prejudiced him. You can make that claim in your direct appeal, but for procedural reasons, defendants usually make them in separate petitions for writs of habeas corpus. That's not a lawsuit against the lawyer, though. Instead, it's a lawsuit seeking your freedom from the state.
- gizmo686 1y agoIneffective assistance of counsel is a thing (and does not require suing the lawyer). However, failing to properly object to how some emojis were entered into evidence is no where near the standard of being ineffective.
- 1y ago
- opwieurposiu 1y agoI have noticed that men and women tend to use different emoji and ascribe different meaning to them. Ex. I see the skull emoji used to indicate laughter more often used by women and crying face used more by men. There are some tribes where men and women have completely different languages, I wonder if we will end up that way with emojis.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoI used to use the :-P emoji on AIM as sort of "that was a joke" emoji, and if I had a nickel for every girl who thought I was flirting with them for using it, I'd have 3 nickels. Not a lot but still weird it happened 3 times. Also how I got my first girlfriend. I wasn't flirting, but she seemed to like what I was doing it so I figured let's give it a shot.
- johnisgood 1y agoTry changing ":" to ";" and that number is going to get increased by quite a lot. :D
- WalterBright 1y ago> men and women tend to use different emoji I went through a brief emoji phase where I had to scroll through a large list of emoji to find just the right one. I eventually realized this was just stupid and use words now.
- WalterBright 1y agoAs an aside, I dislike the juvenile Apple renderings. They look like stickers that come on sheets you'd give a second grader.
- burkaman 1y agoI think you're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubang_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubang_language It does actually seem very applicable here - it's not two different languages, but there's a seemingly random subset of words in the language that have completely different male and female versions. If emojis are part of the language, and men and women use different ones to refer to the same concepts, that's basically the same thing.
- lanyard-textile 1y agoGiven it was not directly brought up in the motion in limine, it sounds like there were other concerns with the message anyway? > it’s possible/probable that the trial outcomes would have been the same with or without the Facebook message evidence.
- Satisfy4400 1y agoIt seems like defense counsel was primarily concerned that the message indicated the defendant owned/possessed a gun. The emoji argument seems to be a secondary concern that he raised only on appeal.
- josefritzishere 1y agoThe year is 2025 and the courts are debating "emoji evidence." That is where we are as a species.
- 542354234235 1y agoI’m not sure I understand this comment. Emojis are a form of communication. Communications can and are evidence used in court. If someone drew pictures related to guns, and then was accused of a gun crime, that evidence would be used. If someone communicated non-verbally to someone by drawing their finger across their throat and then pointing at the person, who later alleged they were attacked by that person, that would be evidence. Emojis are simplified pictograms used as shorthand to communicate, like acronyms or initialisms are simplified representations of multiple words, like someone saying “RIP to you for what you did” could be a threat. If someone sent an email threatening someone else, the court should not present that email incorrectly as raw HTML code. If a WhatsApp message was sent with text bolded for emphasis, it shouldn’t be shown to the jury in plain text. So I don’t understand this derisive attitude towards "emoji evidence."
- toast0 1y ago> If someone sent an email threatening someone else, the court should not present that email incorrectly as raw HTML code. If there was no text/plain alternative, showing the HTML would be acceptable evidence of their crime. Sentencing guidelines for sending mail without a text/plain alternatives aren't established, but I think 1 year for the user and 10 years for the software developer is fair.
- josefritzishere 1y agoI am just despairing the state of the species. We're communicating through comic pictograms like we're reverting to a neolithic state.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoPictographic communication continued into, and separately came about, far more recently than the neolithic era. And history isn't a linear movement of only progress. There is no obvious reason to think the pictographic communication is a degradation of communication.
- skeezyjefferson 1y agoi love how after having actual law professionals take a look at his appraisal, he has to retract all the things he said about law, leaving you with how he noticed emjois werent rendered on a printout. typical internet know nothing
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- layer8 1y agoAs a side note, the FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY emoji doesn’t actually depict tears of joy, but laughing so hard that tears come out of your eyes.
- WalterBright 1y agoTry LOL instead.
- layer8 1y agoLOL isn't quite the same.
- WalterBright 1y agoHow is it different?
- EdwardCoffin 1y agoIn the same vein was an incident where an improperly localized phone in Turkey caused a sent message to arrive with different characters, with very different meaning, and the fallout was two deaths [1], discussed here [2] [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758
- fusslo 1y ago> There are several lessons to take away from this tragedy. One is that localization is a good thing. Another is that it is best not to kill people who make you angry until you have carefully investigated the situation wise wise words
- shkkmo 1y agoThe person that was killed was the person who started the violence, the wife. I would posit that instead physically attacking someone who comes over to apologize, you should try listening first. Also, if your wife and her family are that crazy, give them time to cool down before you put yourself in that situation...
- red-iron-pine 1y agothe father was the one who stirred the pot and misinterpreted the text -- blame him. and this was an estranged wife, which sometimes leads to murders in the US and other places. they were looking for a reason to be pissed at him.
- WalterBright 1y agoIllustrating another facet of problems with emojis and icons. For example, an image of a duck. Is it meant to be a duck, a goose, a pigeon, or a bird? Don't you love that ancient oil lamp icon that is supposed to mean "oil pressure"? Unlike words, you cannot even look up the definition of an emoji or icon. Icon based written languages have been replaced over time with phonetic ones. There's a good reason for that. Icons and emoji don't work. Constantly inventing new ones and adding them to Unicode is simply retarded. There, I said it!!
- Scott-David 1y ago[flagged]
- notfed 1y ago> For example, my software renders the smiling face with horns as red [], but often the depiction is purple. It seems the article is ironically falling for the same problem. This would be worked around by including images of the emoji variants, rather than relying on Unicode.
- john-carter 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]