This made me curious about how slang was handled in court cases and if the same methods could be used for emoji. From a cursory web search it looks like Urban Dictionary is being used to inform...
This made me curious about how slang was handled in court cases and if the same methods could be used for emoji. From a cursory web search it looks like Urban Dictionary is being used to inform judgments. This 2013 New York Times article notes:
In the last year alone, the Web site was used by courts to define iron (“handgun”); catfishing (“the phenomenon of Internet predators that fabricate online identities”); dap (“the knocking of fists together as a greeting, or form of respect”); and grenade (“the solitary ugly girl always found with a group of hotties”).
I can't think of a better solution (funding a centralized academic authority which tracks and studies slang, emojis, dialects, etc.?) but I'm not happy with this one either. Getting a new definition on the site or modifying an existing one seems relatively easy in an age of widespread social media manipulation and even for untampered-with definitions there's no guarantee of quality.
Shouldn't the emoji just be interpreted as their unicode name? I guess legal teams need to hire emoji experts now, hopefully this should lead to more employment for my generation. Eat it boomers.
Shouldn't the emoji just be interpreted as their unicode name? I guess legal teams need to hire emoji experts now, hopefully this should lead to more employment for my generation. Eat it boomers.
Unicode name isn't equivalent to common social use—I hardly think many people think 🍆 to mean "Aubergine", which is the unicode name. You'd also need to consider decoding usage that isn't so...
Unicode name isn't equivalent to common social use—I hardly think many people think 🍆 to mean "Aubergine", which is the unicode name. You'd also need to consider decoding usage that isn't so obvious as "🍆 == lol dick"—the article uses 👑 to mean pimp, which is unintuitive at best, and certainly won't appear in any sort of disambiguation table of emoji were one to be compiled.
Also, consider that there are vendor-specific implementations of emoji art and definition lists. It's no surprise that art differs across platforms, which is why something like Emojipedia exists. But, many platforms also allow you to search across emoji, and because these lists are vendor-specific, you get different results.
To add to the below comments, certain emoji combinations exist which have distinct meanings beyond the literal interpretation. I'm sure I don't need to spell out examples and you can probably...
To add to the below comments, certain emoji combinations exist which have distinct meanings beyond the literal interpretation. I'm sure I don't need to spell out examples and you can probably think of some obvious ones yourself. Beyond that, emoji have had changes in their representations based on the version of the software you're running. For example, on many platforms, 🔫 used to look like a real gun, but has since changed on most platforms to be a toy gun instead. Also, the 🍑 lost its cleft in a beta version of iOS and there was so much backlash that Apple added it back.
With the right algorithms, I'm sure it won't be long before Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, and of course Reddit will be flooded with countless bot-posts and bot-revisions that make all web sources...
With the right algorithms, I'm sure it won't be long before Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, and of course Reddit will be flooded with countless bot-posts and bot-revisions that make all web sources unreliable. :)
This made me curious about how slang was handled in court cases and if the same methods could be used for emoji. From a cursory web search it looks like Urban Dictionary is being used to inform judgments. This 2013 New York Times article notes:
I can't think of a better solution (funding a centralized academic authority which tracks and studies slang, emojis, dialects, etc.?) but I'm not happy with this one either. Getting a new definition on the site or modifying an existing one seems relatively easy in an age of widespread social media manipulation and even for untampered-with definitions there's no guarantee of quality.
Shouldn't the emoji just be interpreted as their unicode name? I guess legal teams need to hire emoji experts now, hopefully this should lead to more employment for my generation. Eat it boomers.
And there was actually a case where one of the major platform holders removed the cleft which resulted in such a backlash that they put it back.
Emojis were a mistake.
Unicode name isn't equivalent to common social use—I hardly think many people think 🍆 to mean "Aubergine", which is the unicode name. You'd also need to consider decoding usage that isn't so obvious as "🍆 == lol dick"—the article uses 👑 to mean pimp, which is unintuitive at best, and certainly won't appear in any sort of disambiguation table of emoji were one to be compiled.
Also, consider that there are vendor-specific implementations of emoji art and definition lists. It's no surprise that art differs across platforms, which is why something like Emojipedia exists. But, many platforms also allow you to search across emoji, and because these lists are vendor-specific, you get different results.
To add to the below comments, certain emoji combinations exist which have distinct meanings beyond the literal interpretation. I'm sure I don't need to spell out examples and you can probably think of some obvious ones yourself. Beyond that, emoji have had changes in their representations based on the version of the software you're running. For example, on many platforms, 🔫 used to look like a real gun, but has since changed on most platforms to be a toy gun instead. Also, the 🍑 lost its cleft in a beta version of iOS and there was so much backlash that Apple added it back.
With the right algorithms, I'm sure it won't be long before Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, and of course Reddit will be flooded with countless bot-posts and bot-revisions that make all web sources unreliable. :)