Emojis are increasingly coming up in court cases | Hacker News Reader

Emojis are increasingly coming up in court cases

cnn.com

49 pointsprostoalex25 comments

I would hope any case where the emoji is described rather than shown to a jury would be tossed as a mistrial. Could you imagine the court describing video evidence instead of allowing the jury to review it?

And yes, what to show for the emoji? Which platform's rendering? What about reactions to the message that can be added in some apps?

All in all I weigh emojis very little compared to other possible evidence considering how convoluted this all is.

And of course sending someone a knife emoji is not a threat. A threat requires specifics.

Valid point about the rendering: I wonder how often Emoji cross-platform rendering causes confusion. (then such confusion leads to something that is presented in court).

> https://emojipedia.org/

I feel like we're overthinking this. Why not just present the court with renderings that would have been used in all devices in question?

I think that's underthinking the issue. It's not just about individual court cases, it's about the dramatic and rapid influence that corporations exert on human-to-human language use. Emoji designs are for-profit investments made by corporations and they are not like normal language.

Corporations are making these emoji and people are using them to communicate. The meanings are ambiguous, never taught in school, tied to profit motives of domestic or foreign corporations, and liable to change at a moment's notice without all parties receiving the same change. It's a mess for future of society and communication, and that it's showing up in court cases with confusion already is a leading indicator that the problems will get worse.

It could still raise the question of whether the sender knew how their emoji would be rendered on the receivers screen. Did the sender know that their water gun would get rendered as a real gun, causing the receiver to feel threatened, or did they assume it would also be a water gun to the receiver, giving off a playful vibe.

I could definitely see the gun emoji mentioned in the article causing issues in a court case. For example, if two people get in an argument, and one person thinks they are sending a playful water gun emoji, but the other person receives a real gun emoji. The person receiving the "real gun" emoji might feel threatened, even though the sender thought they were being playful. It's like when you frustrate your spouse and they say they're going to kill you; context matters, and some device vendors silently change the context for political reasons.

IANAL, but in my opinion, a gun emoji is not a threat in any isolated context. There would need to be enough other context before I would consider it a threat that the emoji would be irrelevant compared with the other evidence.

Well, at least they have a standard description. There are worse things to omit.

If the visual of the emoji is relevant, the defense can always fix it by showing it to the jury.

Courts still want everything written out as if it had to be read to a blind a blind person, which is why it's unusual to see legal briefs even use bullet points but instead a) make the b) same points inline although this is c) much harder to read.

In general most legal writing and procedure is overwrought and obscurantist, not least to serve as a moat between the profession and the public. While I enjoy reading complex arguments and legal witticisms, such archaisms really do a disservice to the public. Many legal documents could be 2/3 the length and far more accessible without any sacrifice of accuracy or depth.

> For example, the pistol emoji looks like a real gun on some devices and a water or toy gun on others.

Article mentions the water gun issue but fails to note that it also changed on the platforms. Open the message one day and see a picture of a real gun, open it the next and see a picture of a toy water gun.

Or even that it changes depending upon the container it's displayed within

> No court guidelines exist on how to approach the topic.

That seems odd. If I send a hand-drawn picture of a knife to someone, I'm pretty sure that would be entered as evidence. Why would a text message with the knife emoji be any different?

For those who are interested in this type of subject matter, I can highly recommend Eric Goldman's blog (the primary source for this article), at https://blog.ericgoldman.org/

Goldman was one of the first "internet lawyers" in Silicon Valley in the 90s, and his blog is a treasure trove of interesting recent court cases on marketing and the internet.

I wonder if there's any public court transcripts where they've put a Unicode expert on the witness stand to explain, in layman terms, what an emoji really is.

:-)

Do you mean U+1F604? (HN won't render emoji) https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-open-mouth-and-smil...

:-) has nearly none of the issues that the emojis have, as it is static, displays nearly the same on all devices, and is not corporate-controlled.

Such is the difference between an emoji and an emoticon.

https://writingexplained.org/emoji-vs-emoticon-difference

How is U+1F604 corporate-controlled?

Corporations control how it's rendered. Can change the glyph around as they see fit. Famously done with the gun emoji.

Corporations control how all shipped font glyphs are rendered on their platforms. An emoji isn't fundamentally different.

Use open source software if you actually care about this.

I agree with you on the gun emoji thing, that was gloriously retarded. But all in all, you can always choose an open source rendering of the glyph.

I think the point is you can't have the people you're sending the emoji to to use your open source rendering of choice. That's how it's corporate controlled. In contrast, corporations don't have as much choice in how plaintext glyphs render, without making them potentially unrecognizable.

Couldn't they just make their font have a ligature so that :-) turns into whatever they want? That's how some programming fonts make stuff like -> or != look different.

How about animated gifs?

Or memes... banned memes!

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