This discussion is not official, but visibly a court takes emojis seriously and wants to assign them a legal meaning... Well emojis were initially designed to track amotions and form a sort of new language, but the court will have to explain what is the meaning of these 3 characters (not really images, just a handful of bytes in a short message) in legal terms. These 3 characters are very far from being convincing, even if they are interpreted as 3 words. This is very low for accusing someone so young of threatening someone with dangerous words. Take a linguistic dictionnary, it is full of these dangerous words. Take a catalog of firearms from the NRA, it is largely more threatening, but the NRA is not charged in a US court... And these characters are really fake firearms, very virtual.
So it's not the meaning, nor the technical mean by which these terms were sent which is essential, the court will in fact want to judge about the intent and the effective psychological nature of this threat. What is the real intent of a 12-year old girl? There's not enough element in the short message to judge and given her age she does not really realize that this could have a so dramatic effect (nobody has experienced that before based on only three words which are not even evident personal insults). We'll have to bring to the fire many old famous comics (intended to children) showing similar images in bubbles instead of slang words, or label them "only for adults". 2016-02-29 10:18 GMT+01:00 Asmus Freytag (t) <[email protected]>: > On 2/28/2016 11:14 PM, Tex Texin wrote: > > However, how any of this belongs on the Unicode list is beyond me. Surely > we do not need to comment on every use of emoji that occurs in the media. > > But there you are mistaken, my dear sir! > > We are constantly told that the discussions on this list have no official > status, and cannot affect the UTCs deliberations, so the only useful topics > left are of the "facebook"-post ilk. > > A./ > > PS: now what was the "tongue-in-cheek" emoji character code again? >
