Emoji are showing up as evidence in court more frequently | Hacker News Reader

Emoji are showing up as evidence in court more frequently

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86 pointsnolawi8968 comments

Emoji have really filled a gap, where words typed on the internet were missing some context of how they are supposed to be read. And nowadays, whether or not I add the eggplant emoji to the end of a whatsapp message can really change how it's interpreted, and gives me less to excuse myself should it come up in court.

But really, anything that removes doubt and clarity from a conversation has got to be a good thing. How many internet arguments have been spared because someone could attach a winky face to show that they were being impish and not to take offence? Obviously, old people hate them, but I can see emoji melding into all forms of language in the future. Or even the global language :thinking-face:

People will argue that you should be able to convey your message clearly in plain English but those people don't realise that: - Not everyone masters English (even when it's your mother tongue, not everyone has access to the same education to be able to use it perfectly) - Languages are complex, we don't talk with words only, we use facial expressions and gestures, emojis help mimic those when only words are available.

If you have the time to consider what you're going to say, like in written communication, then yes, you should be able to do it with just words. Take your time, figure out what you want to say.

Most emoji could likely be replaced with, "And when I say that, I mean it in an X way", where X equals "humourous", "joking", "angry", "flirtatious", etc. Which would be incredibly tedious.

Consider that when you read something with dialogue, e.g. a novel, the author will frequently utilize descriptive words to indicate the tone of the dialogue. E.g. '"You're not going anywhere," he snarled.' As such, a way to indicate tone using just words exists - it's just clumsy to do that for your own statements.

But the context here are conversation which appear in the court records. So they're either breaches of a civil agreement, or criminal law.

By all means use them in your day to day conversations, but if you expect your messages to ever require interpretation in a court of law, and you don't want a jury to decide what you meant by eggplant, kissy face, don't use emoji.

Or, conversely, if you want to be ambiguous, like say you're a pimp communicating to his prostitutes, emoji usage might work in your favor.

I don't think the couple in Israel looking for an apartment ever expected their messages to require interpretation in a court of law. Sure, writing contracts with emojies is probably ill-advised, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

They probably didn't, and I know I come from position of legal awareness, bordering on paranoia, but I would never communicate with a potential landlord over anything but phone and email.

And I suspect the Israeli couple didn't think texts were serious, like an email would be. But the court decided otherwise.

And how do you determine ahead of time with 100% certainty that your communication will not be subject to subpoena and appear in court record?

In a divorce proceeding for example many so called “day to day” conversations will suddenly be open to legal interpretation.

Yeah divorce is a sticky situation. And there's no way to be 100% certain. But if a contract or other agreement involving money is the topic of discussion, it's safe to assume that it might be used as evidence.

> But the context here are conversation which appear in the court records. So they're either breaches of a civil agreement, or criminal law.

No, the fact that she conversation appears in a court record does not mean it was involved in a violation of any law (and you probably meant civil or criminal law; not all civil cases involve even alleged violations of agreememts—contracts isn't the whole civil law universe.)

Courts may exist to determine if a violation of law occurred, but sometimes the answer is “no”. (And even if it is yes, the specific conversation at issue may not have.)

> By all means use them in your day to day conversations, but if you expect your messages to ever require interpretation in a court of law, and you don't want a jury to decide what you meant by eggplant, kissy face, don't use emoji.

Sure, if that's a major concern, but I doubt that it reasonably is for the sender in most communication that actually ends up in court.

No I meant civil agreements, specifically because those are the civil cases the article mentions emojis in the context of court records.

Somehow I'm not convinced that it's better to convey my message by writing "I am flirting with you" rather than by just adding a winking or smiling emoji.

If you expect your message to be subpoenaed and interpreted by a jury, the former is vastly preferable, unless you want ambiguity.

You could literally replace that emoji with the well known phrase "wink, wink." It is well understood and avoids the ambiguity of emoji.

There are places beyond the English-speaking world. As far as I know, there's no equivalent to "wink, wink" in my native language.

What language?

Portuguese.

But then you look like an idiot, which is the opposite of the purpose.

I can scarcely imagine a faster way to look socially inept in text, than writing out so explicitly what are supposed to be nuanced and subtle actions. Eye roll.

I'm not a native English speaker, but I associate the phrase "wink, wink" with lechery more than with flirting.

That said, I also don't usually associate the wink emoji with flirting, but more with tongue-in-cheek fun. Context matters I guess.

https://youtu.be/4Kwh3R0YjuQ

To the entire thread below this, to understand what people around you are doing, you need to understand that there are elements of human communication in which people are deliberately ambiguous. (Not always conciously, but quite deliberately.) It's a huge element of all of the standard human courtship rituals (all the real ones, not the ones that people claim to be using), it's used to speak in plausibly deniable ways for everything ranging from crimes to minor social incidents. The ambiguity itself is part of the message being sent.

Most people actually are very precise in their texts and speech. It's just that the message-carrying layer isn't in the denotations or even the connotation, but the way in which connotations are used. (Humans are amazing things at times.)

(I'm practicing. I have two high-functioning still-pre-teen autist children that I fully expect to have to convey to them an explicit model of human social interactions as they get older. I'm already having to start; the younger really, really wants to be funny. We're actually making some progress. Not, I mean, necessarily a lot of progress... but there is some progress. I'm not saying everyone below is autistic; I have no ability to judge that from here. I'm saying I need practice trying to explain this stuff because I personally definitely do have some autists in my life who will have this problem in the future.)

Hey Jerf, maybe this helps. A good recipe for laughter, is to mix a danger signal with a safety signal. The signals might be physical, like almost falling or tickles. The signals might be grammatical, puns (mistaking one word for another). The signals might be social, things that almost can't be said. I'm sure you can think of examples.

Now, always send safety signals ahead, first build trust and pay attention to how others perceive danger. Make a hypothesis of what signals would work, and test them. Laughter is a great teacher.

That is good, thanks.

I wonder if there is a pre-existing manual for this sort of thing already published? A quick Amazon search didn't produce anything I was looking for.

Well, there are guides, but none good enough that I remember. More generally, not specifically about humor, but about that kind of vision of human nature, read The Naked Ape.

One problem with emojis is that they represent different graphics on different clients, which can subtly change the apparent meaning.

Yeah. The gun emoji being a water gun on Apple platforms is a prime example of this—I'm almost surprised there hasn't been a news story yet where a playful "Bring your :gun: to school tomorrow for water day" was badly misinterpreted due to platform differences.

This reminded me of an issue with emoji in slack... then you type ":)" slack changes it to the emoji, but when you hover over it you see ":slightly_smiling_face:"... the first time I saw this I thought that the message was passive aggressive... it was later that I realize that slack does the change automatically

People will also argue that people have used written communication and done without eggplants and whatnot for centuries -- even though it would have been even easier to do so with pen and paper (i.e. free drawing in hand-written letters).

Other people would argue that Emojis are an illusion of communication. People right here are commenting that the difference in their graphic representation on different platforms sometimes change their meaning!?

I would argue that we didn't need anything beyond (basic) ASCII smiley. The rest are toys, not communication devices. When you have dozens of them you need some sort of dictionary, and at this point I suggest you should learn Chinese instead, if you like to write with symbols that much.

> Despite the potential for emoji to be interpreted in a wide array of ways, emoji experts don’t really exist. “Emoji usually have dialects. They draw meaning from their context. You could absolutely talk about emoji as a phenomenon, but as for what a particular emoji means, you probably wouldn’t go to a linguist. You would probably go to someone who’s familiar with that community, just like they did with the sex trafficking case,” Goldman says.

What does Goldman think linguists do when they research the meaning of words?

emojis are not something strictly defined. They vary across messaging platforms and clients, or versions of clients. Sometimes it means that the person sending them sees a different image then the recepient, which also can lead do different interpretation

I'm reminded of the UK PM, David Cameron, who signed many emails "LOL". He though it meant 'lots of love'.

The meaning of words also differs between dialects and even idiolects. If you ask one person what an emoji means, chances are they will tell you how they interpret it.

> After sending an enthusiastic text confirming that they wanted the apartment,

Anyone who sends little yellow men as part of a business conversation deserves whatever misfortune befalls them.

Anyone who conducts a business conversation over any medium but snail mail, fax, email or the phone deserves whatever misfortune befalls them.

I know this is old-fashioned, but business is business, personal is personal.

> I know this is old-fashioned, but business is business, personal is personal.

People are mixing the personal domain and business all the time. For example: in business meetings, people smile and they tell jokes; also, business people often go out for dinner together.

Yes, but we have 50,000 years of evolutionary practice understand what a smile means in real life.

And we recognize that we still don't all interpret those smiles the same way, as is evident in many legal codes not enforcing "handshake" deals, and written agreements almost always supercede oral ones.

Yet somehow, people don't write jokes into their contracts.

Aren't you being a bit negative here?

Not in the slightest. I am, however, demonstrating that I was raised by lawyers and writers.

As a point of clarification, I'm all for emoji men and gifs in personal communication. I'm probably the biggest giphy user in any given slack group, but only once I feel comfortable with the other channel participants. One of the first things I do is install the cult of the party parrot emoji pack.

But for any communication with outside parties, or where money is on the table, there is no place for emoji, as they're too imprecise.

Certainly, including emoji in say... a contract negotiation could introduce unwanted ambiguity, but that's absolutely not an argument against using text-based messaging platforms for that purpose. Instead, the fact that misunderstandings could be costly is an argument for using precise language for those kinds of discussions regardless of media.

> Anyone who conducts a business conversation over any medium but snail mail, fax, email or the phone deserves whatever misfortune befalls them.

That's going against progress, just like some people were against electronic communication for business transactions when they were first introduced.

I understand where you are coming from, texts are familiar, but more and more business run solely on messaging platforms and rely on texts to conduct business.

And progress for the sake of progress isn't necessarily a good thing.

I've seen people fire off the first thing that comes to mind in a text message in a business setting and almost always realize they weren't as precise as they wanted to be and have to attempt to correct themselves with follow on messages. This mistake and ensuing retraction almost always sours the deal.

Edit: addendum (I'm aware I'm doing exactly what I just made a case against)

Mine, and the Court's right now, expectation is that written communication does not need to be immediate. And since you have a chance to think through what you'd like to write, your first message has no reason not to be precise and correct to your intentions.

How is the phone any less immediate that text messages? If anything, it's even more - you don't even need to press "send".

A phone conversation is understood to be free flowing. It's easier for us as humans to understand that someone is reasoning out a line of logic in real time over the phone. By contrast, a text is not real time, and should therefore be thought out before sending.

Fair enough, but that's only a reason to think out those text messages, not to avoid the medium. I occasionally keep drafts on my messaging apps for days, as I mull them over.

And if you think them out, then that's fine. But a lot of people think texts are hyper-casual and don't give them appropriate consideration.

I'd say the same of email - lots of people just reply without really thinking. Especially nowadays that they are integrated into smartphones along with SMS and such.

I know this might sound stupid, but I really find that softening the boundaries/traditional barriers between work/home really helps improve my quality of life.

I like feeling slightly relaxed at work, and I feel like I'm way more productive than in an environment that feels cold, corporate or artificial.

Having said this, I think that it's really important to listen to the cultural signals that arise from your work environment. I wouldn't be lax, or use emoji/gifs in an environment where it didn't feel appropriate.

I mentioned it elsewhere, but I'm far and away the heaviest giphy user in my slack groups for internal conversation with teammates I'm comfortable and familiar with.

But any external conversations or conversations where money is on the table, emojis and gifs are too ambiguous.

Talking to someone you don't know, it's definitely better to err on the side of simplicity. I wouldn't use gifs/emojis unless I'd had some indication the person I'm talking to would be receptive to it!

It should always be taken with a grain of salt; I guess you can make sweeping statements like "positive/negative tone", but you should be careful attributing exact meanings to it. I mean to some, an eggplant is an eggplant, to others it's a penis. There will be community specific meanings attributed to certain emoji, often unspoken or even unaware.

Just like with words, or colors, or mostly any kind of element of communication.

I frequently use the greening teeth emoji on my iPhone as a negative. Now I know that my Android addressees interpret this as positive.

Yeah, I have always interpretted that particular emoji as wincing in pain, like, "ouch, how incredibly awkward" as if the person were grimacing, or cringing at someone else embarassing themselves.

That's what the face looks like. Abivalent schadenfreude, halfway to laughing at the expense of others.

At best, it reads like laughing at someone who accepts a painful dare, like eating an incredibly spicy pepper and then laughing as they choke and cough and cry from the spice and heat.

Which emoji are you specifically talking about?

There is the grimacing one: https://emojipedia.org/grimacing-face/

But also a grinning one: https://emojipedia.org/grinning-face-with-smiling-eyes/

Unfortunately the latter one used to look like the former one on iOS 6.0: https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-6.0/grinning-face-with-smil...

This may be causing the confusion.

EDIT: HN doesn't support emoji apparently.

It doesn't matter because the vast, vast, vast majority of people lack any sort of technical nuance to negotiate such mild differences in a rush.

As pedantic as the viewer's interpretation may be, the author in any sort of emoji context, is moving fast, to snipe the conversation, just to get a word in, edgewise.

And with soft keyboards, touch typing is non-existent, and adjacent, similar smiley faces get used way, way, way more loosely than abbreviated initialisms (omg r u srs 2???) or typos (your and awesome person) so, to mince emojis as highly specific in meaning is silly.

Half of all emoji usage is drunk dials. The other half is precision cyber bullying and organized crime. Only the margin of error is left to be considered as conveyed in earnest by the sober minded, prudent and cautious fellow citizens we share the road with.

My grandma can't tell the difference. My mom can't tell the difference. My dad doesn't care. My kindergartener just likes them all. 90% of the world isn't equipped to parse mojis in strict mode, but that doesn't mean their emoji use won't be strictly consumed and observed after the fact.

> And with soft keyboards, touch typing is non-existent

I have to disagree here. Touch typing in the sense of feeling the keys is of course impossible but it is quite common to type on the phone without looking at the keyboard and without mistakes.

> Half of all emoji usage is drunk dials. The other half is precision cyber bullying and organized crime. Only the margin of error is left to be considered as conveyed in earnest by the sober minded, prudent and cautious fellow citizens we share the road with.

I curate my Twitter follows quite heavily and the few people I have there use emojis quite a lot and with obvious deliberation. I know it's popular to hate on emoji but looking down on all people using them is not useful.

I use emojis in instant messaging with my wife. We use these two emojis sometimes, as a single message to express a state of mind, they have very specific meaning and are not confused.

In addition to regular conversation we have a shared vocabulary of maybe a dozen emojis to express things that can't be put into words easily or is more effective as a single character. Over time we also developed alternate meaning for some of them.

I was an emoji/emoticon skeptic for a long time but I came to realize they can encode a lot of information.

There's one very popular emoji I particularly hate: https://emojipedia.org/face-with-tears-of-joy/.

Why? Because a) it looks bad (one of the worst made emojis out there), and b) when someone sends it to me, I have no clue what they mean. While it's technically "crying with joy", it also resembles crying with despair - and with regular people, who don't even know what "emoji" is or that they have names, I can't be 100% sure which interpretation they picked.

It has a big smile. How would you interpret this as despair?

Cultural or psychological differences in interpreting facial expressions. It's clearly not despair to me. The mouth is upturned, which indicates smiling.

But to someone who can't easily differentiate upturned from downturned, it might be despair.

In blown-up version like this it's easier to see the upturn. In smaller renderings, like in Facebook & Google products on my desktop and on the phone (or pixelated copy-pastes of it on top of Facebook videos), the rendering sits squarely in the uncanny valley for me. It looks like smiling, but then it looks also like the face is in great pain, with all the muscles contracted, squeezing tears out of its tear ducts.

I suppose the guy who I'm responding to is expecting you to be familiar enough with the full selection of emoji to know that it's definitely the tears of joy emoji and that there isn't a nearly identical one for despair.

It'd be a poor design decision if there were. But it's also unreasonable to expect everyone to think like a good interaction designer.

I know this is anecdotal but there are several examples of this on the web: https://imgur.com/gallery/2VRFr

Oh dear. I've seen this website before, but hadn't thought of it for too long.

My favourite emoji is Apple's rendering of Zany Face: https://emojipedia.org/grinning-face-with-one-large-and-one-...

I find some of those ... disturbing.

It's weird how the meaning of an emoji can change so dramatically depending on which font you're using. The biggest example is the moon face emoji. On Twitter or Android, it's just a cute little moon. On Apple, it suddenly becomes molester moon.

https://emojipedia.org/new-moon-with-face/

"The political purpose of Newspeak is to eliminate ambiguity and nuance (shades of meaning) from the language, and so reduce the language to simple concepts—pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness ..."

What a weird response to a post describing how ambiguous emojies can be.

My friend went bankrupt and a bunch of us had loaned him a little money as a stop gap, and he submitted our Facebook messages as screenshots as proof of the debt he owed us.

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