How do they technically implement this? Custom font? Or replace every emoji with an <img tag?
Twitter has had custom images for emoji for years, the set was/is called Twemoji. This allowed them to have consistent rendering across platforms.
X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
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Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
#22Wow they're working on really important and consequential things over there at Twitter under new management.
My thoughts exactly. For all the hand wringing they did about cutting costs, their focus is on redesigning emojis? It's obvious to me that Elon doesn't actually care about making the service better and solving real problems (like boosting revenue or fixing problems that impact users).
Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
#23Great to see this change. The decision to get rid of the gun emoji was itself an act of political activism, highlighting the left leaning bias in many of these organizations - or at least the power given to the voices that pushed for those changes. It was a naked way to influence the culture around guns, and make them less visible. But it also killed funny uses of the actual pistol emoji. For the record, the underlying Unicode name is “PISTOL” - not squirt gun or ray gun or whatever.
I also think that as harmless as a change from a pistol to ray gun might seem, it is a signal of how far these companies will go to push one particular ideology onto everyone - its employees, customers, etc. These large tech platforms are too powerful and influential to be allowed that kind of deep and far-reaching influence on our politics and culture, and they should behave neutrally as much as possible.
Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
#24The water pistol is an analog of a real gun no matter how silly they are shaped. Growing up most of the plastic guns were models of the Colt M1911 and other semi automatic pistols. As a kid you knew what you were emulating: shooting a real gun at someone. Hell, Cowboys and Indians is a fucked up game for kids used to play. Even the comical looking ray gun is a futuristic energy weapon that is usually depicted as being more devastating than a projectile weapon by burning or vaporizing flesh - totally harmless fun!
Guns are guns. Stop trying to pretend water pistols are somehow harmless images.
Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
#25The fact that the emoji was "censored" to begin with is weird to me. But the internet is weird and now people will be getting banned from X for using gun emojis to promote political violence.
I found it alarming that the meaning of previous texts between many people could be altered by simply changing the glyph of an emote.
And noone voted for it, all companies effectively in charge of these emojis (Google, Apple, etc.) decided for everyone that it was for the best.
What will they change next, who initiated and coordinated that effort, and why, are all important questions.
I'm very much against it. It's the same or worse than altering the text content of a message.
Once you put an emoji symbol out there for a character code and it's agreed upon, it should be immutable.
Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
#26It's interesting that Microsoft started with a toy gun, then someone around 2015-2016 made the decision to turn it into a real gun.
There is pressure to standardize the "feel" of an emoji because otherwise miscommunication can occur between users of different platforms/emoji fonts.
Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
#27Wow they're working on really important and consequential things over there at Twitter under new management.
It was actually one of their employees reading a tweet about it and then just implementing it within an hour or two. The person was shocked at the autonomy X employees have.
Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
#28Wow they're working on really important and consequential things over there at Twitter under new management.
My thoughts exactly. For all the hand wringing they did about cutting costs, their focus is on redesigning emojis? It's obvious to me that Elon doesn't actually care about making the service better and solving real problems (like boosting revenue or fixing problems that impact users).
lmao you really think this took me more than 15 minutes to do?
Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
#29Wow they're working on really important and consequential things over there at Twitter under new management.
My thoughts exactly. For all the hand wringing they did about cutting costs, their focus is on redesigning emojis? It's obvious to me that Elon doesn't actually care about making the service better and solving real problems (like boosting revenue or fixing problems that impact users).
What makes you think their “focus” is on emojis? This is probably just one among many things they’re doing. And it’s the right thing to do, because the political censorship of the pistol emoji is yet another example of how deeply biased tech companies have been in pushing their politics onto customers.
Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm
#30Does this retroactively change the meaning of the emoji people used, or is it only applying to future use of the emoji?
(That would be a fun legal hypothetical.)