Summary
- The firearm emoji you might have seen in the past has been morphed into a less violent water gun by all major vendors in recent years.
- Twitter, which uses its own custom emoji pack called Twemoji on the web, has decided to revert this change and show a firearm instead.
- The X app on Android and iOS still shows the water gun emoji for now, but an X engineer has revealed future plans for the gun emoji, including a more “badass” look to come.
The World Emoji Day on July 17 marked the eleventh annual global celebration of the event. The subsequent day, July 18, marks the day X (Twitter) decided it was a good idea to revert the water gun emoji to its former firearm self — and that too within the same month as an attempted assassination attempt on former US president Donald Trump using a firearm.
This comes roughly six years after the original firearm emoji was converted to look like a water gun by all major emoji vendors in a bid to portray a less violent representation of reality.
The change was first reported by Emojipedia, which stated that the social media platform has long-used the water pistol design, but its recent change, which reportedly started rolling out on July 18, has gone largely unannounced.
The X app on Android and iOS defaults to the device’s emoji set, which means you should still see the water gun emoji if you’re tweeting from your phone. It’s a different story for the X web client, however, which still utilizes the platform’s old Twemoji set.
Source: Emojipedia
You might start seeing the firearm on mobile too
The emoji is already live on the web client, as seen in the screenshots above. It’s worth noting that the firearm emoji isn’t a new one; it’s just a redesign of the water gun emoji that was achieved by altering the emoji’s Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) in a text editor. Currently, even typing in “water gun” in the web client’s emoji picker brings up the firearm depiction.
X user and software engineer @yacineMTB chimed in on Emojipedia’s tweet about the change, taking ownership of the switch to a firearm depiction.
Currently, tweets sent out by other users with the firearm emoji appear differently on the web and on phones. On the web, the emoji appears as a firearm, while on mobile, it still appears as a water gun. @yacineMTB says that they’re “soon updating the rendering on mobile,” which might suggest that the firearm will show up within tweets regardless of your device. Additionally, the software engineer also added that the current firearm design isn’t the final one, and they’re “going to make it look more badass.”
The return of the gun emoji, especially after real-world gun violence at a major event in the US, is sure to spark some concerns. On the other hand, the change likely aligns with CEO Elon Musk’s free speech vision for the platform, even in the face of such controversial decisions.
