Days after an assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump at an open-air rally, X (formerly Twitter) has replaced the water pistol emoji with a handgun. The update can, for the moment, be seen if posts are made from the web browser and not through the app.
An employee of X (uses the handle @yacineMTB) posted on the platform that “the gun emoji was returned back into its rightful form: an M1911”. The update is a departure among tech companies as other emoji vendors pivoted away from firearm imagery between 2016 and 2018.
Apple changed its gun emoji from a realistic-looking silver revolver into a green water pistol in 2016 following a succession of US shootings and pressure from activists. Google too switched to a water pistol in 2018, falling in line with Samsung and WhatsApp. Twitter, under Jack Dorsey, transitioned to a water pistol in 2018.
The timing of the update is interesting as Republicans are staying silent on gun control after the Trump rally shooting. The Republican party is against any new gun reform and Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump campaign adviser, recently told Reuters that if the Republicans are elected, “We’ll see a continuation of supporting and defending the second amendment”.
Elon Musk, the owner of X and the world’s richest man, formally endorsed Trump with a post on X soon after the attempted assassination. His post received over 230 million views and 470,000 retweets, surpassing a post from Barack Obama that said there was “no place” for violence in democracy.
Musk continues to support Trump even when Tesla’s profits slide while the former President desires to do away with electric-vehicle tax credits.
Emoji are universal as far as designations across platforms go and are decided by the Unicode Consortium but each platform decides how it is visually represented. This was at the heart of the Great Cheeseburger emoji debate in 2017: Should the cheese be below the meat patty or above it?
X’s decision to switch to a traditional handgun emoji also brings to the fore the debate about the impact of digital symbols in communication. In 2023, the “thumbs-up” emoji was considered similar to a person's signature by a Canadian judge, who ordered a farmer to pay $61,000 for breach of contract, saying that courts must adapt to the “new reality” of how people interact.
