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X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

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Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#231

Post by whalesalad »

rurp wrote: post #132
whalesalad wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why people call it censorship. Nothing is being censored.

If emojis are speech then removing a particular one sure looks like censorship. Many people do consider them a form of speech, both socially and legally. For example, a thumbs up emoji can be considered agreeing to a contract.

Does the smiling face emoji look like a real face? No, it's a cartoon representation. Same for the handgun, which was replaced by a handgun that is also a cartoonish toy water gun. If anything it was brought more in-line with the rest of the icon style.

It wasn't removed, it was augmented.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#233

Post by _bkyr »

It amazes me that this discussion is so heated instead of a topic like X (and most other social platforms) requiring you to have an account to see anything. X only exists because of users contributions, but almost all of them have decided to lock it behind a paywall.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#234

Post by itishappy »

kortilla wrote: post #190
itishappy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your opinion on this current change of meaning? The previous one has now been in use for 6 years, many messages are about to change meaning, this time in potentially quite negative ways. Follow-up: What's your opinion on the word "woke"? Do you still use the original agreed upon definition from AAVE, or do you prefer the way conservatives have mutated our language? (The question is rhetorical, but I hope you s…

The definition from AAVE is definitely not original. It’s a mutated version as well. The gun emoji had existed as a gun before as well for that many years. Nobody cared about rewriting text history on that change either.

I think we remember that differently. At the time I recall people caring quite a lot. You can find articles written about it on just about every mainstream media organization.

I'm still a bit unclear on your position towards the current changes. Your post makes it sound like you oppose changes in general, but your tone makes me think it's specific to the change from 2016. How do you feel about the current changes?

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#235

Post by whazor »

rurp wrote: post #150
edwinjm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want a real gun? I bet most uses are to bully people. It seems that's the kind of social network Elon wants.

Does changing it to a water pistol actually reduce bullying at all? I suspect not. My bet is that the water pistol change was driven by virtue signaling and corporate risk aversion rather than any real belief that it would do anything useful. Conversely though, the decision to change it back is probably driven by trolling and attention-seeking more than anything.

But this emoji comes included by default with mobile phones. Realistically than means that young children get to see and use this emoji. Unknowingly, they might be sending death threats, whereas with a water gun that would be like a joke.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#236

Post by falcor84 »

sph wrote: post #208
falcor84 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what dialect does SpaceX sound exactly like "space sex"? Sounds like a stretch to me.

space ex -> space sex? It's literally one consonant sound away, not a "stretch" in any dialect of English.

I'm not trying to be obtuse, but literally don't understand how someone would get from "space ex" to "space sex" unless they are intentionally trying to stretch/double the consonant.

To be clear, I'm willing to agree that it's a funny mispronunciation, but am unwilling to accept that this particular naming was an intentional juvenile joke by Musk. It's widely known he's a fan of the letter X, and I believe that fully explains "SpaceX".

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#237

Post by qsort »

derefr wrote: post #230
qsort wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I believe including emoji in unicode was a blunder. A capital "A" is the same in any font; I can write a message in monospace and my interlocutor can read it in sans-serif, or tap in morse code and have it rendered in hand- writing, in all cases the difference is immaterial. On the other hand we don't use pictures in the same way, the meaning of the message depends on the exact picture used as part of the…

Unicode is descriptive, not prescriptive. The point of any glyph at all being allocated a Unicode codepoint, is that the glyph already exists in documents somewhere (either real paper documents, or digital documents in some other legacy encoding); and if Unicode didn't include a codepoint to encode that glyph, then that text wouldn't be able to be faithfully represented in Unicode. Which means that some ephemeral und…

Unicode is definitely a prescriptive standard. Code point 65 is a capital A because Unicode says so -- any such standard is necessarily prescriptive.

> Which means that some ephemeral undocumented proprietary encoding might be used instead

I'm not arguing against the need of some standard for representing those, I'm just objecting to the technical decision of incorporating them as code points, because they don't serve the same semantical purpose.

Instead you could have introduced -- for example -- a simple vector graphics format.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#238

Post by recursive »

llm_trw wrote: post #191
recursive wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a special case of how different fonts appear different.

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf This is a case of companies rendering 1F52B to something it is specifically not.

Well yes. I don't think it's really defensible to render a code point using a glyph with a different semantic meaning. But "inconsistent" emoji rendering will always be a thing.

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#239

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #205
theultdev wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely an umbrella term and we'd be here for a while discussing all facets of it, but in this case in particular it's the movement to censor speech under the guise of anti-gun rhetoric (like an emoji will cause gun violence). That is no different than Christians trying to ban violent video games. Note that I am not the one who brought up the term to the conversation. I did want to avoid the labels as there's…

Umbrella Term is a optimistic description for something so nebulous and used so frivolously. It is more commonly used as "anything I don't like is woke" and "any opinion that doesn't match mine is censoring me."

Censorship has a very specific definition. And changing the pistol emoji to prevent certain ideas or politics from being communicated was censorship.

As for woke - I don't understand why people ask for a definition. A quick search brings up many useful definitions: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Woke

Re: X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

#240

Post by GuB-42 »

whalesalad wrote: post #3

I wish that websites would stop overriding the emoji icons and just use the platform default.

The problem is that my platform is not your platform. And if I send you a water pistol with my phone and you receive a handgun on your PC, it is a problem.

So it makes sense for websites to force the rendering, so that everyone gets the same message.

Ideally, that pistol emoji mess shouldn't have started in the first place. It was clearly intended as a real gun, and variations in rendering shouldn't have impacted the meaning, but they did, and that's how we got there. If they wanted to off the real gun for a water pistol, they should have used a different code point, made keyboards only suggest that code point, and maybe censor the original pistol like they do swear words. No ambiguity.

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