X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm

This seems like approximately the dumbest possible place to have political battles. Isn't the entire purpose of having a standard set of emojis as part of Unicode to enable reliable communication of the concepts and emotions associated with them?

In that sense it's perfectly fine if it was a water pistol, a real gun or whatever else as long as it's the same thing everywhere. But the same codepoint showing up as a water pistol to one half of the audience and as a gun to the other seems to be just begging for misunderstandings - and in a charged atmosphere like X no less where this could easily spiral into drama, shitstorms or worse.

The 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 have always found the :pistol: -> water gun thing to be a great example of corporate NewSpeak in the service of some ideology.

If you mean a pistol, it should be a pistol.

If you mean a water gun, it should be a water gun.

Having both icons seems perfectly fine.

So I rather like this change: it reverts a Newspeakism back to normal meaning. Also, as another commentator points out, the relevant Unicode symbol definition image is an actual pistol.

anyway, a bit of a molehill to get riled up about. I have a mountain of code to climb. Ta!

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

This from a guy who unveils his new data center at exactly 420 and has a line of cars intentionally named to spell out “s3xy” and the reason we’re all forced to say “space sex” out loud every time we talk about a rocket launch.

We are trapped in a meme.

Wow they're working on really important and consequential things over there at Twitter under new management.

Wow. Microsoft's original version was a pretty good compromise. (they used a futuristic blaster icon)

This is exactly as stupid as changing it to a water pistol in the first place was

A hundred years from now people are going to have a very... interesting time trying to figure out what meaning was intended by the use of these characters at the time a text was written.

Personally, I think putting a huge set of pictograms into the Universal Character Set was a mistake and that emojis should be deprecated immediately, and this is the #1 reason why: the meaning of a text should not normally change based on the font used to render it.

So edgy. Must be peak edgelords working at Twitter these days.

The emoji is actually "Pistol" or "Gun" in the Unicode standard. It was originally represented as a real gun, but — for lack of a better term — activists chose to reinterpret it. If people want a "Water Pistol" or "Water Gun" emoji there should be one!

It looks as if Twitter could easily fire some more people and still keep operations up .

Does 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.)

<Meta Question/Observation about HN>

I've noticed that culture war type conversations have become completely normalized on HN after the COVID pandemic.

These kinds of discussions never change any minds and are just a toxic cesspit of online commentators arguing against each other.

Why hasn't HN considered limiting these kinds of conversations. Almost 2-3 times every week I notice some kind of topic like this arising on HN, and infecting other conversations on the platform.

Furthermore, I have notice significant traction from accounts created post-2020 on these kinds of discussions unlike other discussions on HN.

This is sure to fix all their problems

Great 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.

Why aren't emojis just part of your font or customizable? I'd love to mod mine back into the old Google blobs

Could the word "gun" be added to the title, so it would come up in HN search for the query "gun emoji", please? Something like

    X redesigns Water Pistol "gun" Emoji back to a firearm

would be ideal.

---

BTW, what is the reason this post is currently [flagged]? I almost (re-)posted it myself (since I've sloppily searched for that "gun emoji" instead of the URL what returned zero results for this week), because I find it interesting especially from the technical and "semiotical" point of view. I see it is somewhat political topic as well, it even might be covered on the TV eventually (?), but I think other HN relevant aspects overweight that.

How do they technically implement this? Custom font? Or replace every emoji with an <img tag?

X/Elon just does this stuff to stay in the news, we should just start ignoring it...

It's interesting that Microsoft started with a toy gun, then someone around 2015-2016 made the decision to turn it into a real gun.

OK. I have a modest proposal:

Anyone can use any emoji they want.

To achieve this users declare emoji's in a known format the browser recognizes inline in text, which includes a content hash of the emoji they wish to use. eg. ":T15PXExNem0xX:"

Browsers use a DHT and local emoji datastore looking to the DHT to fetch any emoji's seen in text but not present locally.

You may submit a picture to your browser to create an emoji, but it must be a 128x128 webp image. The browser calculates the hash, and puts it in your local datastore. You may now use this emoji anywhere.

A few things to think through here:

1. Would be nice to have an non profit come forward and make a nice big server act as a reliable hub to the emoji database. The nice thing is, basically anyone can step forward at any time and provide servers to the network. Anyone can serve the emoji to anyone as they are addressed by their hash.

2. Regarding offensive or hateful emoji's, I think the question "What if this is used to promote hate?" Is a good question to be asking. But try to keep in mind that the system I am outlining is meant to be communication infrastructure, not a platform. Think of it like a different way to write text. This system in and of itself isn't a platform at all, as the only way to discover and use emoji's is to see someone use it somewhere else. You can browse your local datastore, but that's it.

3. What about REALLY hateful or outright illegal content? IPFS is a guiding light here (in more ways than one if people are familiar with the project). Lists can be made of Violating content by third party organizations and browsers could be configured to subscribe to those lists, very similar to the way ad blocking networks work. Apparatus could be constructed from there to support DMCA and abuse reports and distribute block lists. These subscription lists are user configurable, in case those apparatus are captured or abused and users feel the need to revolt.

Likely more issues than this? I don't think there's anything that is insurmountable. But that's the rough outline. Instead of relying on the unicode consortium, take advantage of content hashing distribution networks to create user defined emoji's instead.

I think about a system a lot when stuff like this comes up. Because I ask, what would be the most popular examples in such a database look like? Do we think it would be close to what the unicode consortium laid out?

The question in my mind is why Twitter even should be using its own emoji set at all. Seems like it should either be up to the operating system vendor or the user what font they use for emoji.

The 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.

Is it me or does that emoji look a little more like a Ruger SR9 than a Colt M1911?

I mean... it's not exactly a SR9 either, but it's definitely not a 1911 as the twitterrer implied.

I grew up with the argument that video game violence causes real violence. At the time, conservatives were keen on censoring violence, blood and gore in movies, video games and TV shows. It was the liberal establishment that defended artistic violence and sexuality. Now it seems like the pendulum swung and liberals seem keen on promoting squirt gun emojis, meanwhile some of the most popular video games on the market are things like Call of Duty where you blast people away with automatic machine guns and sniper rifle head shots.

It's very strange keeping up with the shifting tides of opinions about these sorts of things.

It should be a firearm. The illegal collusion as described in the article should be punished.

crazy how much drama ONE employee at X can stir up just because they felt like changing it

I’m so tired of these culture wars.

The whole censorship of the original emoji was incredibly pointless and stupid. Now we have to rehash this all over again and I’ll have to hear about it.

And this time, with Elon behind it, people are going to be even more uppity about whichever position you take. It’s insane to even feel pressured to take a position on a friggin hieroglyph. And both sides will argue that it’s the other side making it political.

No wonder I’m on Prozac.

That's good. Shouldn't have changed to begin with. If Apple wanted a water pistol they should have gone through the process to add a new one.

On the other hand, the IOC just added E-sports to the olympics. No shooter games allowed.

this species really find time to fight about everything.

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.

I like the Samsung 2018 design where you can't really understand if it's a toy or a futuristic ray gun.

... but more than that, I don't like how they keep playing with those designs all the time.

Is this part of new twitter management to "destroy the woke mind virus"? Yikes.

Buddy's mind has wondered off to the hadal zone. Well beyond the point of "no return".

See also: "Elon Musk's X adds pro-Trump icons for Trump hashtags" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020124)

Twitter is just a barely disguised Truth Social now.

You can see when they all went woke. Guns emojis bad, next is knives.

Very good. Emoji censorship is ridiculous

A more elegant emoji, from a more civilized age.

Xitterbros gonna xitterbro. Im sort of surprised this didn't happen Day One. I guess Elon overlooked that.

“Oh no the attempted murder of Jonald Chump was going too far, we need to cook down the discourse!” - every politician and pundit

“I want Twitter’s gun emoji to look like a real gun instead of a wussy toy!” - Elmo Munk