Elon Musk has brought about a lot of change to the platform formerly known as Twitter. Most notably, he dropped the Twitter name for “X.” He completely stripped verification of all of its meaning. And Musk’s new content policies at X basically mean nearly anything goes on the platform.
Just this past week, there was another change made to X that seemingly went by under the radar.
X has dropped the “water pistol” emoji, which was depicted as a colorful and harmless looking child’s toy — and replaced it with an emoji depicting an actual gun.
Trading in the water pistol emoji for a gun emoji on X
The announcement was originally made on X by @yacineMTB, an employee of the company,
“update announcement on x dot com (the website), the gun emoji was returned back into its rightful form: an m1911,” reads the X employees post alongside a “Pepe the frog” meme and a side-by-side comparison of the water pistol emoji and the gun emoji.
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The Verge noticed the change on Tuesday and pointed out how then-Twitter first introduced the water pistol emoji in 2018. The gun image was the original depiction for the emoji as decided by the Unicode Consortium, the group that basically controls the introduction of new emojis.
In 2016, Apple decided to swap the gun emoji for the friendlier imagery of the water pistol emoji. Companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter followed soon after. So many tech companies made the change to a water pistol that the Unicode Consortium ended up officially updating the gun emoji as the water pistol emoji.
On July 18, X employee @yacineMTB announced that they had made the change back to the gun emoji on the X website.
“Fixed on web, soon to be fixed in rendering on mobile!” Elon Musk said in a reply to the emoji announcement.
It appears that X is the only platform making this change for now. Other popular online platforms continue to show the toy water gun emoji.
