Imagine if you sent an email from your Android phone to your buddy, who happened to use an Apple iPhone that his kid threw away when the newer, shiner iPhone came out. You’re both lawyers, working on a case, and your email said, “the defendant was found in possession of a gun.” Except the email your buddy received said, “the defendant was found in possession of a toy.”
Ridiculous? Maybe not as much as you think, as Apple has decided that it doesn’t like guns. And in furtherance of some policy dreamed up by someone at Apple, they’ve decided that their machines won’t use guns. Not the word gun, for the moment, but the cartoon image of a gun. You know, emojis. Apple has replaced the gun emoji with a squirt gun.
This month, Apple previewed some changes to its next generation of iPhones and iPads with the promise that “all the things you love to do are more expressive, more dynamic and more fun than ever.” That especially includes emojis, those little icons that, according to one study, 92 percent of the online population now make part of their everyday communication.
One change in particular, though, is not delighting everyone. Apple’s new suite of operating systems appears to replace its pistol emoji, which was an image of a six-shooter, with a squirt gun.
Why this was done isn’t exactly clear. The official explanation is the usual marketing crap that suffices for most people, ” more expressive, more dynamic and more fun than ever,” probably assuming that anyone foolish enough to buy an iPhone will be satisfied by this. A pretty good bet, by the way. But Jonathan Zittrain looks a litter harder:
It’s possible that the company’s decision on the pistol resulted from a#DisarmTheiPhone campaign by a public relations firm working with New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. “There is a gun we all carry that we can all give up,” explains a video on the campaign’s website — meaning the iPhone’s picture of a gun. But the campaign was not asking individual people to abstain from using the emoji; it aimed at persuading Apple to prevent, in one swoop, anyone from sending or receiving that cartoon image of a handgun.
For those who hate guns enough, this would be great news. After all, guns are evil, and anything they can do to make it harder for guns to appear to exist serves their ends. Go TEAM! And much as some of those same folks decry the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, because corporations aren’t people and shouldn’t be entitled to free speech, they might rethink their views for Apple because this is just a corporation exercising free speech, right? Some might even chalk it up to Schadenfreude, because hypocrisy is too harsh a word.
But as much as emojis aren’t taken very seriously by very serious folks, they are certainly in common use by young people, and are subject to a uniform convention across the internet so that companies can’t do what Apple is doing.
Apple’s change is ill considered because it breaks the conceptual compatibility that Unicode is meant to establish. Anyone with an iPhone ought to be able to send a message to someone with another company’s products — like Google or Microsoft or Samsung — and have what’s delivered communicate the same idea as what’s sent. But with this change, a squirt gun sent from an iPhone will turn into a handgun when received by an Android device, and vice versa.
There are many companies with their finger in our internet, upon whom we depend to use and enjoy this disruptive (yes, the internet warrants the awful word) technology. While the big ones today are obvious, there will no doubt be others coming along as well. Compatibility across platforms and corporations is what allows this to happen. Without it, the internet doesn’t work. This is true from IP addresses, to URLs, to, yes, the dreaded emoji. Either we’re all working with the same rules or nothing works.
“But it’s emojis,” you say. First they came for the emojis, and I did not speak out because I didn’t use emojis. Except it’s not just emojis. This is just one example, more concrete perhaps but only one, of a push happening with some success throughout internet platforms.
To take a related example, some have demanded that Facebook actively monitor live feeds — whether through a squad of customer service reps or through artificial intelligence methods — and cut off those that might be threats to public safety or merely considered inappropriate. This is a dangerous path to tread when there are only a handful of private gatekeepers.
And then there’s the Twitters, where the corporation has decided, without explanation to disappear voices that are either deemed too hurtful or too politically extreme, and not in the way Twitter prefers. While there is a difference between removing individuals from a private platform, which is within a business’ right and control, removing words or ideas which are subject to an agreed-upon convention raises a very different problem.
To eliminate an elemental concept from a language’s vocabulary is to reflect a sweeping view of how availability of language can control behavior, as well as a strange desire for companies — and inevitably, governments — to police our behavior through that language. In the United States, this confuses taking a particular position on the Second Amendment, concerning the right to bear arms, with the First, which guarantees freedom of speech, including speech about arms.
Perhaps the best answer would be for Unicode to shun Apple for its refusal to adhere to the agreed-upon protocols that allow the internet to work. If Apple doesn’t want to use the emojis that Unicode has approved, and other companies allow, then cut Apple off altogether. Turn Apple into the Betamax of the internet, which in a way is what it has always wanted to be anyway.
Then again, is Apple too big to fail? If Unicode was to cut Apple off (assuming this was even possible), if Android phones no longer communicated with iPhones, would that hurt Apple or Android worse? Because if not, then there is no stopping Apple from deciding what words or ideas should be eradicated from our vocabulary in furtherance of its politics. Sure, today it’s a stupid emoji, so why get all bothered. It’s not like Apple could make words it didn’t like disappear, right?
That whirring sound you hear is René Magritte spinning in his grave.
Will the model of phone you typed your comment on be the factor to determine your intent or will they just charge you anyway?
It’s funny, I try to expand the concept beyond the obvious, only to have other people reduce it back to all about emojis. Best laid plans and all. The only thing left is for someone to post a link to the Unicode list of emojis. What are the chances?
http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f52b
Yup. Who could have seen this coming?
The list shows a lot of display differences based on device. This is not unusual. Unicode specifically does not require support of emojis.
The differences aren’t substantive, but design preferences. One company doesn’t change the meaning of another company’s emoji.
Exactly. Changing the word “gun” to “toy” is substantive. Displaying an applefied green pistol for the 1f52b pistol emoji is not.
Then what the hell are Zittrain and I thinking when we should have asked you instead.
Is Apple paying you to make people stupider? If so, you should disclose that. If not, you should consider whether to have children.
That’s just mean. And my job.
Apple has always taken steps to
censorcurate what grows inside their walled garden. Want porn? Use an android app or use the web. It’s not like Apple customers don’t like porn — data released by pornhub a couple of years ago showed that Safari was used by 73% of their tablet-wielding visitors, while only 14% of them used chrome.So if Tim Cook doesn’t like looking at pictures of naked women or guns, Apple’s going to make it harder for their customers to do that, and they are going to love and thank Apple, and ask politely for another.
Patrick, mark the calendar, we agree.
Although there is no evidence this trivial design change has anything to do with Apple trying to express themselves on gun control, even if there were…Doesn’t Apple have free speech rights as well?
I don’t think “free speech rights” means what you think it does.
Funny, today I was thinking “Apple hasn’t said why it would be making this change” doesn’t mean what you think it does.
Well, that one went over my head, but I bet it would be really funny if I had a clue what you meant.
Read Zittrain’s article again, slowly this time. Or don’t. This is a trivial design change which has no appreciable impact on the ephemeral nature of communicating with Emojis and there is no evidence Apple made this inconsequential design decision as a means of expressing themselves on the issue of gun control.
Frankly, I’m just disappointed in you (and Harvard’s best thinkers on Internet and Society). There must have been something more worthy of all of your attention than this ridiculously paltry design decision.
If you say so.
“the ephemeral nature of communicating with Emojis”
Insupportable assumption.
Is there an emoji for ephemeral?
Ephemeral nature: ?
I would assume the prosecutor or my co-counsel or whoever would understand “their” photo of the toy would refer to the firearm at issue. But then, if they can’t figure that out from a lawyer sending cartoon pictures by text rather than a simple call or email or, like, plain English text, then that seems the last of their clients’ issues.
On to the substance, don’t use Apple or Twitter. Recently I came upon the word Twitter in Wouk’s The Hope and seeing it in non-sarcastic context drove home it’s being an appropriate anachronism. If it’s that big a deal, like not wanting a stylus on your phone, then buy accordingly. Assuming all texts across devices and mobiles OS are subject to government surveillance, the Unicode won’t hide the content, so it’s a shiny bright object to care about how Apple transposes/interprets cartoon emotive symbols.
This wasn’t about a lawyer sending another lawyer an emoji. It is inexplicable that you are allowed to practice law.
”
Imagine if you sent an email from your Android phone to your buddy, who happened to use an Apple iPhone that his kid threw away when the newer, shiner iPhone came out. You’re both lawyers, working on a case, and your email said, “the defendant was found in possession of a gun.” Except the email your buddy received said, “the defendant was found in possession of a toy.”
”
I thought it was about two lawyers. My bad, SHG. I guess other state bars have nothing on rigorous NY testing standards.
Where do you see emoji in there, Marc? Does it not explicitly say “the defendant was found in possession of a gun”? So yes, you’ve now confirmed it. Many times over.
Unicode is a technical standard for the representation of text. Apple can no more be cut off from Unicode than Home Depot from the ISO metric screw thread standard.
You’re both lawyers emailing around sensitive information and you’re not encrypting it? WTF? Stop sending sensitive, critical information on the e-equivalent of a freaking post card. Relevant, it has been Apple, not Google with Android, that has long natively supported email crypto on their mobile OS. And the comments here on Unicode are just hilarious.
Your entire post is textbook MUH FEELZ-based bikeshedding: a whole lot of words about something utterly non-substantive (the Unicode specification does not require an specific representation of a given emoji character code, that’s up to implementors) in favor of actual security. In the past you and other good law bloggers in general have rightly suggested that non-lawyers, particularly those communicating information to the public like journalists and bloggers, would be smart to do some research before making strong assertions on matter of law. You should consider doing the same thing on matters of technology.
Using encryption misses the point. It’s about changing content, whether in emails by lawyers or anyone else (lawyers was just an example, not the point). It could have been your grandmother. It could have been a text. Just examples. Get it?
This post addressed Zittrain’s New York Times op-ed (did you happen to click the link or cruise past that part?). I didn’t invent it.
>Using encryption misses the point. It’s about changing content, whether in emails by lawyers or anyone else
No, it’s not about changing contents here. “Changing content” is very different from an IME making an arbitrary decision about the visual representation of a character point where the specification explicitly leaves it up to the IME. You argued a slippery slope (“not the word gun, *for the moment*”, “first they came for the emojis”), and that’s an argument that takes a great deal of care. In this case, according to the Unicode Consortium emoji *are* different, letters/words (including both phonetically constructed ones as we have in English and pictographics ala Kanji) simply are not equivalent to emoji under the current technical specifications, so if you (or anyone else) chooses to depend on them in the same way you’re purposefully depending on a foundation of sand and then complaining about it not being concrete. This has been known for a while and shows up elsewhere. For a less politically connected example, “U+1F36A Cookie” on a Samsung platform shows up as saltine crackers. It doesn’t even take a platform holder, as far as the display goes, that could be altered simply by choosing a different font set (which of course is utterly arbitrary on PCs, and you’re able to load onto an Apple or Google mobile device as well, in Apple’s case using the free Configurator). Or for that matter based on the website (Facebook and Twitter both have their own choices) or app (Mozilla does its own thing). You want to talk about guns and be assured of your chosen semantic representation? Use the word “gun”. Or “銃”, or whatever your preferred common language equivalent is. If I texted someone at the grocery store asking them to get some “U+1F36A’s please” and they come back with crackers instead of cookies that’d be my fault for not asking them to get me “cookies”. There is no expectation of language being filtered (by anyone other then the owner) on any platform, but emoji visual representation is arbitrary. You do not allow URLs in comments, but you could look up for example “Investigating the Potential for Miscommunication Using Emoji” as another recent post on the subject, that time looking at the simple smily face.
If you wanted to lobby that Unicode should have a specific required specification for representation of emoji code points you could do that, but right now it doesn’t. There is no slippery slope. If you’re worried about changes to *contents* then use encryption, which you should be doing anyway. When you invoke Orwell in an argument that’s purely bikeshedding, you cheapen the reference, and I think you shouldn’t precisely because government and corporate actors actually genuinely are engaging in scary Orwellian behavior and have the potential to do far, far worse. While not for altruistic reasons, iOS has actually been better then Android in that regard, though Apple is still bad in terms of making it hard/impossible for owners of their iOS-based computers to actually have full control over those systems should they wish to. That’s a worthy angle of attack (including the directly related issue of censorship and restrictions on the App Store). Emoji is not.
>This post addressed Zittrain’s New York Times op-ed (did you happen to click the link or cruise past that part?). I didn’t invent it.
I read that and didn’t think you invented it because this all came up weeks ago on tech sites and was discussed far more thoroughly back then. To put it politely, I’d suggest that NYT op-eds may not be an optimal source of balanced coverage of technology issues. And even that op-ed does grudgingly note in passing that
>”For those emojis Unicode has already approved, like gun, it’s up to each company to create a picture for it.”
before moving smartly along to grind his axe. A better op-ed would be have been “Emoji can change from platform to platform, should it be more defined?” or something along those lines.
Also
>”Perhaps the best answer would be for Unicode to shun Apple for its refusal to adhere to the agreed-upon protocols that allow the internet to work. If Apple doesn’t want to use the emojis that Unicode has approved, and other companies allow, then cut Apple off altogether.”
was just painful. That is not how unicode works or has ever worked. Also note that Apple is a full member of the Unicode Consortium, just like basically every major software and hardware platform company in existence as well as a number of governments. The entire Unicode effort in the first place was founded by Xerox and Apple in the late 80s.
I always enjoy it when someone uses all those words to tell me what I mean. So we’re clear, you can invoke Orwell whenever you think it’s appropriate. I’ll do the same. No one asked for your permission or approval, and if you think I’ve cheapened it, start a blog, write a post, say so.
Ahh, you want to talk about the specification. Scott’s given you plenty of rope, so let’s see if he’ll indulge me for a bit. According to unicode.org (I hope that’s authoritative enough for you), the “guidelines for the use and display of Unicode emoji characters” are in Unicode technical report #51, which says, among other things (the bolding is mine):
You go on to say:
That some things are already broken is not a good excuse to deliberately break other things, and your argument that the standard is silent on the appearance and semantics of emojis is as full of shit as the rest of your commentary.
Apparently, Zittrain (and I) wasn’t the only one who understand’s apples move as attempting to control speech, although Fast Code Design raises the flip side, that their change undermines gun control advocates.
There’s no serious question that Apple’s move is purposely massively revisionist. Apple employee Peter Edberg, one of the two authors of that sensible unicode emoji spec, will shortly be scheduled for re-education.
>I always enjoy it when someone uses all those words to tell me what I mean.
Given that you even read such a subtext into a basic argument, I doubt it.
>So we’re clear, you can invoke Orwell whenever you think it’s appropriate. I’ll do the same.
And when you do it in a stupid way that’s destructive to efforts to defend free speech, there may be people who choose to point that out. That’s how the market of ideas works. And you explicitly ask right now.
>No one asked for your permission or approval
Where did I say you needed my permission or approval? Otherwise nice strawman. You provide space for comments, and your stated rules do not currently require that all comments simply agree with you. You could certainly make that a rule if you wanted, and I’d understand.
>and if you think I’ve cheapened it, start a blog, write a post, say so.
If you don’t want comments to engage in any sort of argument or debate with you, say so. Or if there’s a line beyond which it’s too much (you only want simple factual corrections say) you could say that too. Or if you just want to enforce some notion of brevity with a strict word limit ala standard letters to the editor, say so, or add a line of script to your page to enforce it automatically. Why be passive-aggressive about it? You have total control here. If you just want to carve out a safe space for your opinions while giving it a veneer of “comments” that’s an option too of course, but it seems contrary to the apparent point of your blog entirely.
I guess I now just don’t really get what you even want with this place. Right now you’ve got a big fat “What Do You Think?” at the top of your site, you *do* ask us. That gives the impression that, like normal blogs with comments enabled, you’re putting out your ideas and opinions, hoping people will read them and give them due consideration, and then possibly share what they think about them in a respectful but not hyper sensitive way. I mean, I genuinely don’t want to waste your time, and I genuinely don’t want to waste mine either. I don’t want to do research and put thought into a comment if it’s just a bait and switch to be met with “lol tl;dr”. I thought your blog is a good perspective on an principle that concerns me and allowed a bit of moderated back and forth a couple times a year, that’s all. What gives? You don’t need to beat around the bush, just state what type of person and comments you want and I and anyone else like me will be happy to obey that or else leave. I’m not trying to sell anything, I’m not important, I’m just some guy. Tell me to scoot and I’ll scoot.
Curse it, that was of course meant to be a reply to above. Sorry for accidentally making it a new sub thread.
I appreciate this. I especially appreciate its brevity.
I see you’re very sensitive, so I’ll do my best to be kind. Here’s the deal. I write the posts. You get to write comments. I may or may not respond, and I may or may not deal with every aspect of your comment. I am not under an obligation to engage in lengthy (and in your case, very lengthy) discussion with everyone who chooses to comment. That seems to bother you, as if you’re entitled to my time. You’re not.
If I wanted an echo chamber, I could just as easily trash your comments for disagreeing with me. I didn’t. It’s all there for everybody to read. Did you think I’m not only obliged to read your comments, but agree with you? Sorry, if that’s the case, but no. In fact, with long comments, I usually skim to see if they interest me. Your comments weren’t all that interesting. Nothing personal.
As for start a blog, that’s because you are rather long winded and persistent. You said your piece, and then continued to push. You don’t get to demand I pay attention to you, argue with you, anything with you.
I posted your comments (which is more than a great many other commenters can say, as today was a particularly stupid day), but your dissatisfied that I didn’t play with you. Sorry, but you expect too much of me. You don’t have to scoot on my account, but if you can’t stop whining that you didn’t get enough of my attention, then I can’t help you.
Bear in mind, I didn’t come to your house asking if you would come out and play with me. You came to my house. I posted your comments for the world to see what you have to say. You’re welcome.
While the jumping off point for this item is the bizarre success of the disarmtheiphone lobby group’s focus on the utter trivia of smartphone emotis, I do think this is important and thank you for raising it.
While it does appear that the Unicode protocol leaves emotis to the discretion of the smartphone provider, the fact is that the Unicode protocol is not law. It is a voluntarily adopted industry consortium. You are free to leave.
What SHG’s item portends is that very concerning day when a powerful lobby group (or government agency?) comes up against a dominant smartphone provider with a well organized boycott to be triggered unless the smartphone provider agrees to go along with the embargoed list of “not nice” words, phrases, and topics, even if that means having to leave Unicode.
And suddenly a big game hunter becomes a bunny rapist. Or vice-versa. Orwell lives.
The article that SHG mentions in this comment makes several interesting points. One of those points is that it may be classist to value words above pictures.
The reference I discuss in this comment claims that’s not true. Do you have a different/better one?
You’re describing the entire internet protocol stack. The smart people who define and implement these things have several tools to route around damage. One of those is shame, and it is properly applied here.
Another point made by the article SHG referenced is that this revisionism occurs automatically and encompasses things written (picted?) well before Apple decided to make this change. 1984’s government should have had it so easy.
It’s also a reprise of the broader issue of what our freedoms mean in a society where the actual exercise of those freedoms in practice often requires the complicity, or at least neutrality, of private parties with freedom and property interests of their own.
A generation or two ago we grappled with this question as it related to the rights of people of color to travel and engage in commerce. That playing field is now expanding to include some of the most popular forms of communication, and the forces in tension now include not only race and religion, but industry and political affiliation.