Interestingly, this seems to be a pattern — in cases where the other providers are depicting an emoji “per the spec” but one provider is doing something unusual, the unusual depiction almost always spreads to fixation among the other providers.
For example, “loudly crying face” (https://emojipedia.org/loudly-crying-face) was literally supposed to just be a kind of mouth-open bawling expression. And that’s how everyone did it… except Apple. Apple gave their version a weirdly mixed expression that people sometimes interpret as “crying while laughing because something is so funny” (even though there’s already a separate emoji for that.) And iOS users kept using this emoji to mean that, while everyone else was confused. But instead of Apple fixing their emoji, everyone else gradually changed their depictions to conform to Apple’s non-standard interpretation. (Seriously, look at the history for each provider in the above link.)
> Apple gave their version a weirdly mixed expression that people sometimes interpret as “crying while laughing because something is so funny” (even though there’s already a separate emoji for that.) And iOS users kept using this emoji to mean that, while everyone else was confused.
This sounds like a small social media niche being interpreted as representative overall. The first 10 search engine results were people primarily interpreting it as a crying/sadness emotion; some used it as an expression of general intense emotion. This seems consistent with actual crying, which can be a reaction to many different intense emotions, not just sadness.
In a criminal defense scenario you should take into account how the sender sees it, potentially how the recipient sees it, and whether the sender was aware the recipient would see it differently.
I mean, it is how my own SO sees/understands this emoji (despite my insistence that that's not "what it means.") I just found out that she uses this emoji that way a few days ago, and then this article reminded me of that.
But I didn't mean to argue from social proof. Rather the opposite!
My argument was more—how else should you read the actual evidence? That evidence being that all the other providers' emojis started off depicting an "anguished" down-turned mouth and scrunched eyebrows; but that all of them then gradually reworked their depictions to instead include a neutral 'O' mouth and raised eyebrows, which removes the signifiers of anguish from the expression.
Why else would they all do that, except to cohere with the expectations of users who somehow communicated to them that they expected the emoji's expression to not be read as "anguished"?
"The SoftBank emoji designs heavily influenced Apple's original emoji font which was designed to be compatible with this set when launching in Japan, due to iPhone being a SoftBank-exclusive phone when first released."
Twitter/X is the only major exception, and they only changed it to represent a realistic gun recently.