
Guns Censored by Emoji Police, Apple and Microsoft - alexwoodcreates
http://www.thememo.com/2016/06/20/emoji-rifle-emoji-gun-feminist-emoji-politics/
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cprayingmantis
I don't understand how companies can reconcile the fact they want free and
open internet where people can express their thoughts and ideas yet make moves
to actively restrict expressiveness. When has expression become a bad thing?

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smt88
What can you express with a gun emoji that you can't express better with
words? Emojis are jokes/toys/punctuation. They're not a way to express actual
ideas.

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SamReidHughes
Look at people using them and you'll see they do express actual ideas.

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jimrandomh
Honestly, I would prefer if emojis in general weren't part of the unicode
standard at all. I don't use them, and when others use them in communications
with me I find them distasteful. And putting them into Unicode has created a
battleground for completely-unnecessary conflicts like this one. If people
really want to send each other pictures of olympic sports, can't they just
send actual images?

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forgottenpass
_If people really want to send each other pictures of olympic sports, can 't
they just send actual images?_

Right now emoji is the only way to send content-addressable images in-band.

Extending the character set is probably not the best way to do it, but might
be the least-worst. Everything else gets very tricky very fast.

An alternative can't use fonts to work around the need for a parser somewhere
in every GUI stack ever. And that's in addition to figuring out about where
and how the images get stored. Is there is an image set to be implemented as a
matter of compatibility, is the image embedded in a multipart message wasting
bandwidth when the same pictograph is used in more than one message, or is now
a connectivity expectation to render otherwise readable-offline material?

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x1798DE
I kinda feel like this is the sort of thing that would be ideal for a
separate, non-unicode standard, like a markup language:

<emoji="smiling face" attr="skin-color:yellow"/>

It seems like a nasty hack to include pictures of things as code points, since
they don't really share much in common with linguistic characters other than
that they hold some semantic value.

