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Interesting! So far I have seen the opposite - that different sub groups speaking the same language assign different meanings to different emojis, leading to misunderstandings when communicating cross-group. For example, the ubiquitous laugh-to-tears emoji means genuine amusement for some, sarcastic, sometimes even malicious laughter for others.

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Isn't it?! There's plenty of talking about how "we're regressing to hieroglyphs", but that doesn't capture the nuance in usage of emojis in different languages.

Your example expands well to old-school emoticons. Where I live, an "xD" serves as a laugh and is used in rather general way. Meanwhile in the Anglosphere it's stereotypically associated with specific demographics

What demographics?

As an American who uses it (well, a variant, XD) and knows where I adopted it, I'll hazard a guess: millennial men who were extremely online in the late 2000s and early 2010s, during the Golden Age of phpBB and before the rise of the smartphone and modern social media.

FWIW phpBB was released in year 2000, just to place that on the timeline.

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