The Real Problem With Emoji

As my daughter and I bobbed in our pool floats, I wondered when my wife, still inside the house, was going to join us. I’d left my phone ashore, so I tapped into messages on my smartwatch. I navigated carefully to the emoji interface, then scrolled to find the swimming pool. But no such emoji exists. Instead, there is a person swimming (????). It would be sufficient; I tapped the tiny icon on my tiny screen, only to then be presented with a choice of skin tones for my swimmer: light, medium, dark, or Simpsons-yellow. I picked one and sent the message, which ultimately did what I intended: signal to my wife that we were in the pool. (Later, I discovered that I had actually selected the “man swimming” emoji; separate emoji depict a woman and a gender-neutral person swimming, which unfurl into their own menus of skin colors.)

Using emoji used to be fun and efficient, but now it feels both fraught and ineffective. Instead of communicating the idea of a thing, emoji are now expected to illustrate a specific person, scene, or situation. Although better representation of individuals of all kinds, in all contexts, is a desirable social goal (as I’ve written before), this approach has significant drawbacks. Emoji are now an illustrative language rather than an ideographic one—they depict specific scenes rather than gesturing toward concepts. And people, rather than ideas, are at the center of emoji-speak. When I searched the emoji for “swim,” the various pictures on offer all implied specific embodiment: a bikini, a Speedo, and a one-piece women’s swimsuit. My expression was neither satisfied nor expedited by emoji. I wished I’d just used words instead.

[Read: I will not thumbs-up your email]

My encounter with the innocuous swimming-themed emoji occurred in the aftermath of a more portentous emoji culture war. Although emoji are standardized by an organization called the Unicode Consortium, each platform is free to implement its own image for each one. In 2016, Apple changed its depiction of the gun emoji to a toy water pistol. The company had, it seemed, chosen to abandon the revolver in response to the ongoing epidemic of American gun violence, perhaps to distance itself from that topic. (A spokesperson for the company did not answer questions about the company’s decision by the time of publication.) By 2018, major companies such as Google, Samsung, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft had followed suit. The shift was so widespread that Unicode changed the emoji’s official name to “water pistol.”

But Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, recently reversed course. The social-media platform now embraces the firearm again as a weapon, not a toy, having replaced the water gun with a cartoon depiction of a semiautomatic pistol. An X software engineer who posted about the change wrote that “the gun emoji was returned back into its rightful form,” naming a specific firearm, the Colt M1911. He added a Pepe the Frog image, a common alt-right symbol online, and shared an X post that read, “First they came for our real gun emojis and we said nothing.” Writing at Fast Company, Chris Stokel-Walker called the new emoji “disturbingly realistic.”

But emoji are language, and the presence of a gun emoji doesn’t entail violence any more than the word gun does. One may refer to guns, at times, when intending violence—in one case, a man was jailed for sending an ex-girlfriend the emoji, which a judge construed as a threat. Yet for platforms to attempt to ban the image even over this concern is to force a step backward for human expression. Those who wanted to use the image for communication—no matter the purpose—had previously found themselves constrained to a specific and decidedly secondary meaning of the term (that is, a toy). Like it or not, a gun is a firearm—a device used to propel a bullet at high velocity through explosive force.

The common, pre-2016 design for this emoji, a revolver, offered a reasonable take on the matter. That’s because the six-shooter is a good approximation for a generic abstraction of a handgun. You can still purchase and use a revolver, but it evokes a murky, timeless concept with a long history: It suggests the Wild West, law enforcement, prowlers, bank robbers, castle doctrinists, and more. As a generic, it also makes for a good, rebus-like stand-in for firearm-adjacent concepts: firing something in the generic sense, or guns as a nickname for biceps—or, paired with the emoji showing a splash of water, as the water gun that replaced it.

By contrast, X’s new gun emoji could certainly feel more threatening—but not because it is no longer a toy, nor because it is realistic, as Stokel-Walker wrote (emoji are cartoons; none are truly realistic). Rather, it’s because the semiautomatic handgun that X uses to render the gun emoji has a different and more particular cultural significance. The Colt M1911 is not just a regular gun, as The Verge called it. For decades, it was the standard-issue sidearm for the U.S. Armed Forces and has sometimes been used by law enforcement. As a generic representation of a semiautomatic pistol, the image also evokes more contemporary uses such as recreational shooting, home defense, street crime, and more. Compared with the revolver, those activities are more readily connected to guns as an implement in the culture wars. Semiautomatic pistols also generally look the same as fully automatic ones; both types are the subject of deep strife in America.

Put differently, X’s change feels pregnant with political meaning because it is a specific kind of non-toy handgun. Emoji ought to be as broadly expressive as possible. Guns—and swimming, and much more—would be most fruitfully emojified in the most generic, abstract way possible. Yet emoji seem to be evolving in the opposite direction. Unicode approves more new icons every year, with more specific and narrow intended meanings—a lime or a mythical phoenix, say. New emoji this year even include variants that specify which direction the picture faces—a person running to the right rather than to the left—a choice that only further plunges emoji-life into the murk of particulars. This year, Apple also announced Genmoji, a forthcoming feature that uses AI to allow individual users to spawn what seems like any concept imaginable. The feature is meant to “match any moment perfectly,” according to Apple. An example shown in a marketing video turned the prompt “smiley relaxing wearing cucumbers” into, well, a yellow emoji head wearing cucumbers, spa-style; “lox bagel” produced a convincing rendition of that preparation. Users will also be able to create Genmoji that resemble real people in your photo albums—presumably adjusting them for specific situations.

[Read: Yet another iPhone, dear God]

That sounds fun but also doomed. Will Genmoji allow you to depict your mother holding a firearm? Apple didn’t respond when I asked what guardrails it might apply to user-created Genmoji. But some people will be bothered, no matter how the feature works. Consider a less charged but still controversial matter: Apple’s demo depicted a lox bagel eaten as a sandwich rather than open-faced, as some purists insist it should be eaten.

Whether textual or visual, languages are powerful because they allow an infinity of complex expression. And languages work because the communities that use them develop a shared understanding of their meaning. For years, emoji have been transforming from a sophisticated, powerful visual language capable of diverse expression into just a format for sending pictures that conform to the emoji visual style. To which I say, ????.