Violent emoji are starting to get people in trouble with the law
There are 17 different emojis for love ( ❤️ ), but none for hate. There is an emoji for peace ✌️, but none for war. There are many characters missing from the current emoji gallery, and with action verbs in short supply, I keep turning to the gun. I use it as a congratulatory phrase upon completing a difficult work-out. I use it to describe the show-stopping beauty of Fashion Week. And I use it for protest. Of course, all of this is now under reconsideration because last week a New York teenager was charged with threatening police with emoji violence because of his use of the gun:
Now you may be thinking, “It’s just a cartoon. The cop is smiling for god’s sake.” But the young man is now under $150,000 bail for terroristic threats, aggravated harassment and possession of a weapon and drugs, so clearly the NYPD is not smiling. The arrest came, as if on cue, after a Mashable article wondered if emoji could legally constitute a threat of actual violence. Though the law governing intent to harm varies somewhat from state to state, it seems to boil down to this: Can the message be considered, by a reasonable person, to constitute an actionable threat? So the question then becomes, would a reasonable person consider this a threat:
It would be easy to dismiss emoji as mere comedy. Out of the over 800 emoji characters available on my phone, almost all the vice is contained on a single tab, housing and . These are not the only characters that can be used for malice. My favorite thing about emoji is that characters don’t have a single definition; the limitations in the vocabulary can even push you into some surprising poetry. The could be an innocuous fist bump or an act of aggression, depending on the situation. People are already using for scandal beyond the original intent of its design. Emoji lend emotional context to otherwise expressionless texts, but they also require context in order to be read. When you strip them of their context your only option is to interpret them literally.
While nothing stunts the imagination more than taking an emoji at face value, there are times when the literal interpretation cannot be disregarded. In November, two teens were arrested for posting this on the anonymous social media app Yik Yak:
“Attention RHS students ”
Regardless of the intent of the students, a message like that requires a response. It’s the emoji equivalent of announcing loudly to the TSA agent at the airport that you have a bomb in your carry-on. And this is the disturbing reality: emoji do not exist in a void, they exist in our culture of violence. I can think of a half dozen colloquial expressions that are more than a little disturbing when written in emoji: