The INSIDER Summary: 

• 16-year-old Rayouf Alhumedhi was baffled by the fact that there wasn't an emoji to represent hijabi women.
• She sent a proposal to The Unicode Consortium, who then paired her with a designer to create the emoji.
• The emoji has been met with both positive and negative responses from online commenters.
• Apple will release the new emoji later this year.

16-year-old Rayouf Alhumedhi was creating a group chat with her friends on Whatsapp when she was struck by the fact that there was no emoji that looked like her.

“The fact that there wasn’t an emoji to represent me and the millions of other hijabi women across the world was baffling to me,” she told CNN. “I just wanted an emoji of me.”

She decided right then and there that this had to change. The Saudi-born teen, who now lives in Berlin, wrote up a quick proposal and sent it off to The Unicode Consortium, the non-profit corporation that approves and designs new emojis.

Unicode immediately paid attention. They paired Alhumedhi with a designer and the result was the new hijab emoji announced yesterday as part of World Emoji Day (yes, that really is a thing). Apple will release it, along with a bunch of other new emoji characters, later this year on all their devices.

Alhumedhi is super happy with the result — which she saw for the first time yesterday, along with the rest of the world.

There’s been a ton of support online for the new hijab emoji, along with plenty of backlash.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hosted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the website with Alhumedhi. Many commenters posted that were resistant to the idea, with some arguing that “wearing the hijab is not a free choice” but rather “socially coerced.” Yet others called the headscarves “part of patriarchal constructs that oppress women.”

But not every commenter sided with the naysayers. “I think you’re looking at this issue from the perspective of a white westerner,” one person shot back. “So, since you seem to be a feminist, wouldn’t you agree that part of feminism is being able to wear whatever you want, whenever you want, without fear of judgment?”

Alhumedhi’s aware that not everyone’s on board with her new emoji. She still hopes that once the hijab character appears in our devices, “that will establish that notion that we are normal people carrying out daily routines just like you,” she told CNN.

Unicode’s been pumping out plenty of new official emoji lately — as of June, there are 2,666 emoji total. It’s also been trying to include a greater variety of flags, skin colors, and jobs.

Sure they’re just little drawings. But in our emoji-obsessed world, a hijab character definitely signals better representation for Muslim ladies all over the globe.

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Scroll through Twitter and you’ll find plenty of sarcastic comments—not to mention lots of cases where sarcasm apparently went straight over someone’s head.

Luckily, an algorithm MIT researchers developed to analyze tweets can now detect sarcasm, and emotional subtext in general, better than most people.

Detecting the sentiment of social-media posts is already useful for tracking attitudes toward brands and products, and for identifying signals that might indicate trends in the financial markets.

But more accurately discerning the meaning of tweets and comments could help computers automatically spot and quash abuse and hate speech online. A deeper understanding of Twitter should also help academics understand how information and influence flows through the network. What’s more, as machines become smarter, the ability to sense emotion could become an important feature of human-to-machine communication.

The researchers originally aimed to develop a system capable of detecting racist posts on Twitter. But they soon realized that the meaning of many messages couldn’t be properly understood without some understanding of sarcasm.

The algorithm uses deep learning, a popular machine-learning technique that relies on training a very large simulated neural network to recognize subtle patterns using a large amount of data. The secret to training this algorithm was that many tweets already use something like a labeling system for emotional content: emoji. Once they took advantage of this to help the system read tweets for emotion in general, the researchers had a head start in teaching it to recognize sarcasm.

“Because we can’t use intonation in our voice or body language to contextualize what we are saying, emoji are the way we do it online,” says Iyad Rahwan, an associate professor the MIT Media lab who developed the algorithm with one of his students, Bjarke Felbo. “The neural network learned the connection between a certain kind of language and an emoji.”

To train the algorithm, dubbed DeepMoji, the researchers collected 55 billion tweets, and then selected 1.2 billion containing some combination of 64 popular emoji. First they trained the system to predict which emoji would be used with a particular message, depending on whether it was happy, sad, humorous, and so on. After that, the system was taught to identify sarcasm using an existing data set of labeled examples. The algorithm that had been pre-trained using emoji was far better at detecting sarcasm than one that hadn’t. They will release the algorithm for anyone to use.

To see how good DeepMoji is, the researchers tested it against several benchmarks for sensing sentiment and emotion in text. They found that it performed far better than the best existing algorithms in each case.

They also tested it against humans, using volunteers recruited through the crowdsourcing site Mechanical Turk. They found it was better than the humans at spotting sarcasm and other emotions on Twitter. It was 82 percent accurate at identifying sarcasm correctly, compared with an average score of 76 percent for the human volunteers.

“It might be that it’s learning all the different slang,” Felbo says. “People have very interesting uses of language [on Twitter]—let’s put it that way.”

The researchers have built a DeepMoji website to demonstrate the emoji part of the system. It will automatically append suitable emoji to a piece of text. It seems to work pretty well, although when I tried inputting Donald Trump’s now-infamous “covfefe” tweet it was as confused as everyone else.

The site also lets users contribute to the research by annotating their own tweets with emotions. This is an important element of the work, Rahwan says. Usually researchers have volunteers tag other people’s tweets or posts with perceived emotion, which provides a less direct measure. “These benchmarks don’t capture what psychologists would consider true sentiment,” he says.

Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University and an expert on mining social networks for meaning, says using emoji as a means of training is a clever idea. But he questions how valuable it is to identify sarcasm if it’s lost on most people. “If the sarcasm is so nuanced that a human reader would likely miss it, then it really doesn’t matter,” he says.

Nonetheless, the work reflects the fact that computers are gradually getting better at sensing human emotion. Sentiment analysis of text is already a widely used technique. For example, it can help companies determine from the contents of an e-mail or chat message if a customer is particularly irate.

It may become ever more common for computers to try to decipher our emotions. Imagine, perhaps, a robot coworker that understands when its human colleagues are getting frustrated—or when they deliver a sarcastic compliment.

“If machines are going to cooperate with us, then they’re going to have to understand us, and emotion is really hard,” Rahwan says.

SEE ALSO: There are 69 new emoji candidates — and we've ranked them all

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The INSIDER Summary:

• Unicode has announced 67 new prospective emojis for 2018.
• There are probably going to be a lot of food emoji additions.
• A pink icing cupcake and a sliced open bagel are likely to make the cut.

Are there times when your poop emoji just isn’t feeling so happy? Now you’re going to turn that smile upside down as Unicode has announced 67 new prospective emojis for 2018 and a sad-faced poop is among the new additions being considered. The company’s president Mark Davis unveiled the candidates at the company’s quarterly meeting and we are so stoked for the new emoticons that could be heading our way. There are 10 different smiley faces being considered, with one including a party hat and confetti to show you’re having a blast. You’ll also be able to show off what temperature you’re dealing with, as they’ve got a blue face with frozen icicles on it for when you’re freezing in the winter and a red face with its tongue out and sweat pouring off of it for when it’s sweltering outside. 

Everyone loves food emojis so naturally they’re adding some yummy new favorites to the list. A pink-icing covered cupcake is a surefire winner, a sliced open bagel is in the mix as well as a salt shaker, moon pie, leafy green lettuce and a mango! For animals you could very well be able to show of when you’re getting swarmed by insects as a mosquito emoji is on the list. A little bit more appealing ones include a lobster, peacock, kangaroo, llama and even a hippo! Click here pics of stars using emojis to cover their nipples.

The mosquito one could come in handy with a new hiking boot emoji to tell everyone you’re outside hitting the trail. Other clothing items of clothing include a lab coat, goggles and a women’s ballet flat shoe (yes!!!). There are new fun activity emojis that include softballs, a frisbee, skateboard and even a jigsaw puzzle piece for when you’re having a chill night at home.  For the very opposite of fun you can let people know when you’re housecleaning with a broom, basket, a sponge and to go along with that poop emoji, there’s even a roll of toilet paper being considered! You can check out the full list of the 67 new emojis being considered by clicking here.

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Ginger-haired smartphone users have long been petitioning for an icon that better represents their gloriously auburn locks, and now the wait may finally be over.

After years of campaigning, Emojipedia has, today, released the list of 67 emoji under consideration for 2018’s drop of new icons - and amongst them is a redheaded woman and man.

The redhead emoji will be presented at the subcommittee’s fourth-quarter meeting later this year, and if approved, will likely appear on iPhone user’s keyboards in early 2018.

Despite Apple recently rolling out several gender and race-inclusive updates to the emoji family, redheads have long been missing from the mix.

There was global outcry earlier in the year when Apple unveiled its IOS 10.2 software update, which notably snubbed a long-standing Change.org petition for the tech giant to develop a ginger emoji.

Just 1 to 2 per cent of the population is born with red hair, but that means as many as 138,000,000 iPhones are crying out for a ginger-friendly update. That’s also not to mention those who choose to dye their hair in shades of red, copper and tangerine.

Unsurprisingly, the news of a red-haired icon on the horizon has been greeted with excitement over social media.

‘Woke up to news that there is finally going to be a redhead emoji. It’s about time!’ wrote one excited user.

At the moment, it looks as though the new ginger options will only be rolled be out across the standard woman and man icons.

Also up for consideration is a curly hair emoji, a woman’s flat shoe, a kangaroo, a skateboard and a frowning pile of poo.

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The INSIDER Summary:

• Kendall Jenner is being criticized for using a fist bump emoji in a "medium" skin tone in a recent tweet.
• Twitter users called her out for using the "wrong" emoji that has a darker skin tone than her own, with some accusing her of cultural appropriation.
• A few people defended Jenner and argued that the color emoji she used was trivial.
• Jenner doesn't appear to have responded to the backlash.

Kendall Jenner is facing backlash from social media users over an emoji.

The reality star and model chose a fist bump emoji in "medium"— a darker skin tone than her own, critics said — when she shared the interview she and her family gave to The Hollywood Reporter over Twitter.

After Jenner fired off the August 16 tweet, which we first saw on Cosmopolitan, several users responded by arguing that she had used the "wrong emoji," while some accused her of cultural appropriation. 

Others brought up the short-lived Pepsi ad that showed the 21-year-old model with a group of protesters who were accused of appropriating the Black Lives Matter movement.

However, some Twitter users saw nothing wrong with Jenner using the emoji in the "medium" shade — the third color in the palette of five available to emoji users — and argued that those offended were being petty.

Jenner used the same emoji in an Instagram post as well. Though the color of the emoji wasn't a big topic of conversation in the comments, one user wrote: "You wish you were brown white girl @kendalljenner."

Wherever you land on the emoji debate, it seems that Jenner continues to offend a lot of people both in her professional and everyday life. Most recently, the model was criticized earlier this month for starring in an Adidas campaign that called her "original," though the sportswear brand has since defended the ad.

Despite the backlash following her emoji use, Jenner has continued to post as usual on both her Twitter and Instagram accounts — and she hasn't addressed the backlash publicly. But, as Cosmopolitan points out, Jenner's latest photo seems to imply that she doesn't care what people think.

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A new app is trying to make it simpler to help you react to photos and videos that your friends post online — it's using AI to capture your facial expressions and automatically translate them into a range of emoji faces.

Polygram, which is free and available only for the iPhone for now, is a social app that lets you share things like photos, videos, and messages.

Unlike on, say, Facebook, though, where you have a small range of pre-set reactions to choose from beyond clicking a little thumbs-up icon, Polygram uses a neural network that runs locally on the phone to figure out if you're smiling, frowning, bored, embarrassed, surprised, and more.

Marcin Kmiec, one of Polygram's cofounders, says the app's AI works by capturing your face with the front-facing camera on the phone and analyzing sequences of images as quickly as possible, rather than just looking at specific points on the face like your pupils and nose. This is done directly on the phone, using the iPhone's graphics processing unit, he says.

When you look at a post in the app (for now the posts seem to consist of a suspicious amount of luxury vacation spots, fancy cars, and women in tight clothing), you see a small yellow emoji on the bottom of the display, its expression changing along with your real one.

There's a slight delay—20 milliseconds, which is just barely noticeable— between what you're expressing on your face and what shows up in the app. The app records your response (or responses, if your expression changes a few times) in a little log of emoji on the side of the screen, along with those of others who've already looked at the same post.

The app is clearly meant to appeal to those who really care about how they're perceived on social media: users can see a tally of the emoji reactions to each photo or video they post to the app, as well as details about who looked at the post, how long they looked at it, and where they're located.

This might be helpful for some mega-users, but could turn off those who are more wary about how their activity is tracked, even when it's anonymized.

And, as many app makers know, it's hard to succeed in social media; for every Instagram or Snapchat there are countless ones that fail to catch on. (Remember Secret? Or Path? Or Yik Yak? Or Google+?)

Polygram's founders say they're concentrating on using the technology in their own app for now, but they also think it could be useful in other kinds of apps, like telemedicine, where it could be used to gauge a patient's reaction to a doctor or nurse, for instance.

Eventually, they say, they may release software tools that let other developers come up with their own applications for the technology.

For more science news, useful insights, and cool stuff, follow us on Instagram.

SEE ALSO: Ginger emojis are finally coming to the iPhone

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Put a smiley face on it: WhatsApp is getting its own emojis.

The Facebook-owned company on Monday unveiled a proprietary set of the symbols that will be used in its chat app. Previously, WhatsApp used Apple's emojis not only in its iPhone and Mac apps, but also in its apps for Android and Windows devices.  

Despite the change, it looks like WhatsApp took a lot of inspiration from Apple's designers. For the most part, it's hard to tell the difference between WhatsApp's emojis and Apple's. 

That's not to say they are indistinguishable, however. WhatsApp's information desk lady emoji has a teal shirt and a bob, while Apple's has longer hair and a purple shirt. And WhatsApp's ghost emoji, unlike Apple's, doesn't have a black eye or gray shading.

The messaging company's symbol set is only in beta. So, it's possible WhatsApp will tweak some of the icons before officially launching them. 

The rollout of the new WhatsApp emoji comes as Facebook is going in the opposition direction with Messenger, its other big chat app. The social networking giant on Monday announced that Messenger would no longer be using Messenger's own proprietary set of emojis.

Instead, the Android and web versions of Messenger will use Facebook's set of emojis, yet another set of symbols the company has created. Meanwhile, the iPhone version of Messenger will rely on Apple's emojis.

SEE ALSO: There are 69 new emoji — and we've ranked them all

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According to a new blog post published on Emojipedia (which we first saw via Engadget), WhatsApp is rolling out a new set of self-designed emoji.

They look somewhat similar to the iOS emoji — which the messaging app has so far adopted, even on Android phones — but have a slightly flatter look that is reminiscent of LG's proprietary set.

The update has so far hit only Android customers running WhatsApp's latest beta, but a broader rollout for the platform is to be expected in the coming weeks and months.

It is still unclear, however, whether WhatsApp will adopt the new emoji set on iOS as well. As of this beta release, WhatsApp's is actually ahead of iOS' native emoji support.

The new WhatsApp set uses Unicode's latest standard, Emoji 5.0, which means some of the new emoji inside WhatsApp are not present on iOS as of yet.

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In less than a month, your iPhone is finally getting some new emoji. 

The 69 new symbols have been a long time coming — Unicode, the consortium responsible for choosing the new emoji across all platforms, approved the new emoji last March. 

The new emoji will finally arrive on iPhones "in late October or early November,"according to Emojipedia. MacOS, watchOS, and tvOS will also get the new emoji around the same time, Emojipedia reports. 

Here's the full list of every new emoji coming this fall, excluding all the various skin tone variations:

Apple announced last week that the new emoji would be arriving with the next iOS update, but we now know a more definitive timeframe for when they'll actually be widely available on iPhones. For those who downloaded the developer preview of iOS 11 last June, however, the new emoji should have already arrived. 

For a closer look at all the new symbols, check out Business Insider's comprehensive ranking of all the new emoji. But keep in mind that those emoji are rendered in Emojipedia's "Apple-like style" and aren't the final design of the new symbols. 

The new emoji will be included in the iOS 11.1 software update, which will arrive in about a month. To download, go to Settings > General > Software Update. 

SEE ALSO: There are 69 new emoji — and we've ranked them all

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Rejoice: New emojis are here! 

On Tuesday, Apple released brand new emojis as part of iOS 11.1. There are 70 new characters, and 239 new emojis in total if you include skin tone and gender variations.

To get the new emojis on your own phone, open your settings app, tap "General," then look for the second tab down titled "Software Update." The option to update your iPhone to iOS 11.1 should appear there.  

The new emojis are a long time coming: The characters were approved by the Unicode Consortium back in March, and the final list became public in June. Emojipedia has been covering all the new emoji updates this year, and has the full list of every emoji in every skin tone.

In honor of their arrival, we've compiled all the emoji contenders and ranked them from worst to best. The criteria for the ranking was pretty subjective — mainly, how they made us feel and whether we can actually see people using them in real life. There aren't detailed explanations for most of the rankings, but we do offer a more in-depth analysis for the top 10 on this list.

Take a look:

SEE ALSO: 22 emojis you're probably using wrong

70. Eject button

The eject button has been around for awhile, but it got a makeover in iOS 11.1. According to Emojipedia's Jeremy Burge, the eject button has always been there, but was rendered in black and white. Now, it will show up in Apple's color emoji font.

69. Bowl With Spoon

68. Canned Food

• Apple released a list of the top emoji used by English speakers in the United States.
• "Face With Tears of Joy" is the most used emoji by a lot — although Apple didn't release statistics that give a sense of how often they're used. 
• The list was released as part of a new paper describing a statistical technique Apple uses called "local differential privacy." 

Americans love the crying face emoji that's used to convey hearty laughter, Apple revealed on Friday. The "Face With Tears of Joy" beat out other popular emojis, including the face with heart eyes, rolling eyes, and a skull. 

The chart Apple released was included in a paper describing "local differential privacy," a technique that Apple started to use last year to collect data without compromising user privacy.

Basically, the idea is Apple can add random noise to individual user data to protect privacy. When Apple collects a lot of data points, it's able to control for that noise and gain insights into a huge group without compromising individual privacy.

So that's how Apple is able to rank the most used emojis on iPhones and Macs without specifically spying on the emojis an individual user is typing. 

Here's how Apple describes the technique: 

The differential privacy technology used by Apple is rooted in the idea that statistical noise that is slightly biased can mask a user’s individual data before it is shared with Apple. If many people are submitting the same data, the noise that has been added can average out over large numbers of data points, and Apple can see meaningful information emerge.

Apple's ranking is solid

Apple's list looks pretty close to other top emoji rankings, with one exception, said Jeremy Burge, emoji expert and founder of Emojipedia. 

"Overall Apple's emoji rank looks pretty believable, but the skull stands out as being 7th in Apple's list, but rarely even top 20 when using public data," Burge said. "Are people using the skull differently in private conversations compared to public data sources like Twitter? That's what the data might suggest."

"The other emojis in Apple's list look pretty close to what we see on Emojipedia and sites like EmojiTracker," he continued. 

The fact that Apple's emoji ranking is close to other rankings suggests its differential privacy technique is working. Apple also uses differential privacy to collect other statistics, including websites that drain your battery, websites that crash your browser, and health data. 

The paper published on Friday also describes the specific math and equations used in Apple's implementation. 

If you're curious about what data you're sending to Apple, you can look it up on your iPhone through Settings > Privacy > Analytics > Analytics Data, and you can control whether you send information to Apple in System Preferences.

Read Apple's full paper on differential privacy here. 

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• Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel took to Twitter to clear up some fake rumors about Snapchat shutting down and to tweet a smiley-faced emoji to a man who told Spiegel he had deleted his Facebook account.
• Spiegel's tweet highlights that the longstanding feud between Snapchat and Facebook continues.

Evan Spiegel isn't big on Twitter — the Snapchat CEO is famous for meticulously deleting each of his tweets and recently took a two-year break from the site before returning last September to tweet about a transcoding snafu on Snap. But on Monday night, Spiegel was active on Twitter once more — this time to clear up some fake rumors regarding a Snapchat shutdown and to throw some shade at the company's longtime rival: Facebook. 

When Twitter user Jacob Catalono tweeted to Spiegel "I deleted Facebook the other day. It was a fantastic decision." Spiegel tweeted back a minute later, responding with the single most jubilant, approving symbol of the modern age: the super smiley Emoji face. 

Spiegel's feud with Facebook is longstanding. In May, Spiegel compared Snapchat's rivalry with Facebook to the early days of Google's dealings with Yahoo. After Snapchat turned down Facebook's $3 billion offer to buy the company  in 2013, Facebook set out along the path of largely copying most of Snapchat's most innovative or unique features — for example, releasing a story-sharing app that essentially cloned Snapchat's — further aggravating the tension between the two social media giants and the app designers working within them.

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• Tim Cook confused the flags from New Zealand and Australia when he congratulated Australia in a tweet.
• He quickly realized the error and retweeted the correct standard.
• The two countries' flags are almost identical.

Social media is in a frenzy after Australians voted in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage.

Celebrities, athletes, and business executives have expressed support on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Among them was Apple CEO Tim Cook, who welcomed the result of the government survey with a tweet.

"Congratulations Australia! Another important step toward equality for all," he said.

Cook, however, used the New Zealand flag in the tweet and had to replace it.

We got a screenshot of his initial post:

Here's his replacement tweet:

To be fair, the flags are very similar (the stars are different colors and the Australian flag has an additional star). But someone should have told Cook about the Aussie-Kiwi rivalry.

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Google has made good on its promise to fix its problematic burger emoji in the next Android update, after CEO Sundar Pichai said the company would make it a priority.

As you can see in the image above, Android 8.1 will feature a burger emoji with the cheese correctly placed above the meat patty (that’s really the only way you’d get the cheese to melt).

Right, back to work. Or, you can check out some of the other sensible changes coming to Android 8.1’s emoji set, including beer steins and cheese.

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Google is releasing a new version of Android today (December 5), and with it are updated, fixed versions of its much-criticised emoji, The Verge first reported.

The most notable one is the hamburger, which caused such an echoing outrage on the Internet that the company's very CEO, Sundar Pichai, felt compelled to chime in.

It seemed unreasonable that Google's designer would put cheese below the patty, so Oreo v8.1 is placing it where it rightfully belongs, between the meat and tomato.

But the controversy over the hamburger icon brought users to take further inspection of Google's emoji catalogue, and the beer emoji also seemed to be in dire need of a visual overhaul.

The old icon placed some foam inexplicably floating above an air gap that separated it from the actual liquid, while the new emoji sees the glass filled all the way to the top (as it should be).

Pixel and Pixel 2 customers will be happy to update over the course of today and the rest of the week, but not only for emoji.

The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL's update will finally enable the Pixel Visual Core, Google's self-designed (and previously dormant) chip which will help with its HDR algorithms to get even better pictures out of the phones' already-stellar single lens.

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The new 2017 emojis may have just arrived on iPhones, but it's already time to start thinking about next year's emoji candidates. 

Unicode, the consortium responsible for choosing the new emoji across all platforms, announced the beta version of the 2018 emojis on Monday. The new list includes redheads, a bagel, a lacrosse stick, and more. 

These emojis aren't finalized, however. According to Emojipedia's Jeremy Burge, Unicode won't approve the final list of new emojis until January 2018. Before then, new emojis could be added, removed, or changed. The finalized emojis won't be unveiled until the end of Q1, and they likely won't arrive on devices until the second half of 2018. 

Still, it's exciting to get a glimpse of what may come. Take a look:

SEE ALSO: Here are the 10 most-liked Instagram posts of 2017

We may finally be getting redhead emojis!

There may be a curly-haired emoji, too (and he actually looks a lot like Colin Kaepernick).

There are bald people...

• Legal interpretations of emojis have become necessary as the number of crimes committed using emojis has risen.
• A man in New Zealand was given jail time for stalking his ex-girlfriend after sending her a message with an emoji at the end.
• Other more benign uses of emojis have presented equally perplexing challenges for legal institutions.

Nearly everyone is familiar with emoji, those popular icons that appear in text messages, emails and social media platforms. Emoji are often used as light-hearted adjuncts to text, or to soften the blow of a message.

Emoji can be viewed as overly simplistic in some contexts. For example, government officials were questioned when Foreign Minister Julie Bishop conducted an interview using just emoji, and described Russian President Vladmir Putin using an angry face 😡.

A 2017 study found that use of emoji in work emails reduced perceptions of competence.

But emoji can be taken very seriously in the context of the law.

Our recent publication reports that use of emoji has challenged lawyers, judges, and lawmakers in several countries. In a legal context, emoji are increasingly recognized not as joke or ornament, but as a legitimate form of literacy.

When emojis become weapons

Perhaps the most troubling use of emoji has come through their use in interpersonal messages where it is unclear whether they modify or amplify a prima facie criminal threat.

In New Zealand, a judge considered the role of emoji in a Facebook message sent by a man to his ex-partner. The man wrote, "you’re going to f------ get it ✈️ ."

Concluding that the message and emoji generally conveyed that the defendant was “coming to get” his ex-partner, the judge sentenced the accused to eight months jail on a charge of stalking.

In 2016, a court in France convicted a young man of threatening his ex-girlfriend through a text message sent by mobile phone. The court found that the inclusion of a gun emoji meant that the message amounted to a “death threat in the form of an image”. The court sentenced the defendant to six months’ imprisonment and imposed a €1,000 fine.

The issue has also arisen in several cases in the US. In Virginia in 2015 a high school student was charged with computer harassment and threatening school staff. She had posted several messages to her Instagram account, combining text with emoji (a gun, a knife and a bomb). The messages reportedly showed: "Killing 🔫 . meet me in the library Tuesday 🔫 🔪 💣 ."

The student claimed that she had never intended to make a threat and that the posts had been a joke.

In the same year, a 17-year-old in New York was charged with making a terrorist threat on his Facebook page after posting a policeman emoji, and three guns pointing towards it.

The prosecutor alleged that the message constituted a clear threat to police due to several factors:

• identification of a class of victim (police)
• repeated use of the gun emoji
• placement of the emoji weapons close to the emoji of the officer’s head
• the fact that other violent messages had been posted by the student earlier the same evening.

However, a grand jury failed to indict the defendant, at least in part due to concerns about whether the post really demonstrated criminal intent.

Liability in other threat cases has been more readily established. A high school student was convicted of making a criminal threat after she sent a series of tweets including a variety of emoji and text including, "Ain’t nobody safe 💯 . Mfs wanna test me now 👏🏼 👏🏼 👏🏼 you crazy I’m crazy too let’s die shooting."

Her claim that the tweets were meant to be a joke was unsuccessful.

Perhaps the high point of emoji liability occurred in a case in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. The defendants, who had previously physically attacked the victim, sent him a message comprising only emoji: "👊🏻 👉🏽 🚑 ."

They were subsequently arrested for stalking. And what exactly was the threat contained in their message? That the victim would be beaten (fist) leading to (pointed finger) hospitalization (ambulance).

It is perhaps not surprising that those convicted of issuing criminal threats via emoji have all been relatively young; after all, many studies identify those under 30 as the most prolific digital communicators.

Violent or not, intent is key

Earlier this year a judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland was faced with the problem of deciding whether a deceased man’s estate should go to his wife, or to his brother and nephew.

A key issue was whether an unsent text message on his mobile phone was made at a time when he was capable of making a will. The message bequeathed his house and superannuation to his brother and nephew and ended with the words “My will” followed by a smiley face.

The judge found that the informal nature of the will did not mean that it couldn’t be a valid expression of the deceased’s intentions.

To varying degrees these cases illustrate the difficulty of determining the role of emoji in demonstrating intent. Does the addition of a smiley face detract from the seriousness of the purpose of a will? Do threats made with gun and bomb icons by adolescents genuinely constitute harassment or even terrorism?

These questions require us to identify the standards by which we will evaluate communications employing emoji. It can be a complex decision in the absence of linguistic, semiotic or other digital literacy expertise, and without the context of tone of voice and body gestures. Finding specific meaning intended by emoji in each case often involves some subjective interpretation in telling the difference between transient, insincere or ironic communications, and intentional messages.

It is possible that we may need to develop a “discrete legal space” in which accredited specialists in digital speech issues could assist judges. They could help weigh up evidentiary standards of probity and relevance in relation to emoji and their meaning.

Within that framework we might be able to develop a grammar or heuristic scheme that would allow us to confidently interpret the meaning of these icons, to reliably understand when they negate or amplify intent, and to decipher the human factor that emoji contribute to the law.

With claims that more than 9 million Australians use emoji, determining their meaning in a particular communication may increasingly emerge as a significant legal issue.

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• The Unicode Consortium has approved 157 new emojis.
• The new emojis will be arriving on smartphones later this year. 
• Redheads, a llama, a Petri dish, and a pleading face are among the new symbols.

It's official: we're getting 157 new emoji later this year. 

Unicode, the consortium responsible for choosing the new emojis across all platforms, approved the new emojis this week after working on them for several months. The list of new emojis includes redheads, a peacock, a pirate flag, and a lacrosse stick. 

There are 157 individual emojis, but that includes all six skin tones of each applicable character. With the new class of emojis — known as Emoji 11.0 — the total number of emojis will be 2,823, according to Emojipedia's Jeremy Burge. 

While we most likely won't get the new emoji until next fall, Burge has rendered the new emojis in an "Apple-like style" so we can see what they'll eventually look like in iMessage.

Burge also created this helpful video of all the new characters, which breaks down each individual character in less than three minutes.

Meet all 157 new emojis coming to our smartphones in 2018:

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Apple proposed 13 new emojis last week in a pitch to the Unicode Consortium, the group that officially certifies new emojis for iPhones, Android, and other computers.

If Apple's proposal is well-received, these emojis will become official in 2019, and would become available on iPhones and some Android phones in the second half of that year.

Apple's new emojis have a theme — accessibility. It worked with the American Council of the Blind, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, and the National Association of the Deaf to design these new emojis.

All 13 new emojis can "better represent individuals with disabilities," according to Apple's proposal.

"The current selection of emoji provides a wide array of representations of people, activities, and objects meaningful to the general public, but very few speak to the life experiences of those with disabilities," Apple wrote.

"This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all possible depictions of disabilities, but to provide an initial starting point for greater representation for diversity within the emoji universe," Apple continued.

Check out the emojis below:

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Guide dog with harness

Person with white cane

Person with white cane