Emoji evidence errors don’t undo a murder conviction

An obvious problem is Apple renders the firearm emoji as a water pistol, and everyone else renders it as an actual pistol.

I recently listened to some podcast where they talked about this in the context of threatening texts. Sending someone a gun emoji communicates a very different thing if it shows up as a water pistol vs a realistic looking gun. The court need to see what the sender thought they were sending and what the receiver saw.

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolutio...

Yes. I wouldn't call that emoji "tears with joy" I would calling it "laughing so much you have tears".

To say nothing of the eyes and smile on U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO which kind of made it more disturbing.

One tricky aspect of this is if the messages are from the defendant then the defendant is almost certainly going to use their right not to testify (especially if they are actually guilty) as they'll be asked all sorts of other difficult questions they likely won't want to answer.

Same with everyday language. We just got used to its nuances.

Google's "Messages" client on Android has a feature where, in RCS chats, if you send or receive a message that solely consists of a single applicable emoji (and I believe in response to certain emoji reacts as well?), a little animation plays. The :joy: and related emojis trigger a "haha so funny"-type animation, :cry: and similar trigger a sad, rainy cloud, and so on.

An interesting thing I noticed recently is that :skull: triggers the same "haha so funny" animation as :joy: does! Which kind of surprised me, because I was using the skull to convey "lol I'm dead", so it fit here, but I wouldn't think that's the primary use for it.

Theoretically this is probably where good jury selection comes in.

If a juror is presented a message with an explanation that is obviously “out of touch” with its intended meaning, the juror loses some trust and applies more scrutiny.

If I understand TFA right, it was the defense that made the mistake, which is why the appeal failed. You don't get a do-over when the mistake is on your side.

I used to use the :-P emoji on AIM as sort of "that was a joke" emoji, and if I had a nickel for every girl who thought I was flirting with them for using it, I'd have 3 nickels. Not a lot but still weird it happened 3 times. Also how I got my first girlfriend. I wasn't flirting, but she seemed to like what I was doing it so I figured let's give it a shot.

I think you're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubang_language

It does actually seem very applicable here - it's not two different languages, but there's a seemingly random subset of words in the language that have completely different male and female versions. If emojis are part of the language, and men and women use different ones to refer to the same concepts, that's basically the same thing.

> men and women tend to use different emoji

I went through a brief emoji phase where I had to scroll through a large list of emoji to find just the right one. I eventually realized this was just stupid and use words now.

It seems like defense counsel was primarily concerned that the message indicated the defendant owned/possessed a gun. The emoji argument seems to be a secondary concern that he raised only on appeal.

I’m not sure I understand this comment. Emojis are a form of communication. Communications can and are evidence used in court. If someone drew pictures related to guns, and then was accused of a gun crime, that evidence would be used. If someone communicated non-verbally to someone by drawing their finger across their throat and then pointing at the person, who later alleged they were attacked by that person, that would be evidence. Emojis are simplified pictograms used as shorthand to communicate, like acronyms or initialisms are simplified representations of multiple words, like someone saying “RIP to you for what you did” could be a threat.

If someone sent an email threatening someone else, the court should not present that email incorrectly as raw HTML code. If a WhatsApp message was sent with text bolded for emphasis, it shouldn’t be shown to the jury in plain text. So I don’t understand this derisive attitude towards "emoji evidence."

Try LOL instead.

> There are several lessons to take away from this tragedy. One is that localization is a good thing. Another is that it is best not to kill people who make you angry until you have carefully investigated the situation

wise wise words