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Emoji Are Showing Up in Court Cases Exponentially, and Courts Aren't Prepared (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the times,-they-are-changin' dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Bay Area prosecutors were trying to prove that a man arrested during a prostitution sting was guilty of pimping charges, and among the evidence was a series of Instagram DMs (direct messages) he'd allegedly sent to a woman. One read: "Teamwork make the dream work" with high heels and money bag emoji placed at the end. Prosecutors said the message implied a working relationship between the two of them. The defendant said it could mean he was trying to strike up a romantic relationship. Who was right?

Emoji are showing up as evidence in court more frequently with each passing year. Between 2004 and 2019, there was an exponential rise in emoji and emoticon references in US court opinions, with over 30 percent of all cases appearing in 2018, according to Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who has been tracking all of the references to "emoji" and "emoticon" that show up in US court opinions. So far, the emoji and emoticons have rarely been important enough to sway the direction of a case, but as they become more common, the ambiguity in how emoji are displayed and what we interpret emoji to mean could become a larger issue for courts to contend with.

5 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. could it be by renegade600 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    could it be?? Is the world slowly returning to hieroglyphs??

    1. Re:could it be by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      No. For most of history people have been largely illiterate peasants. We're returning to the historical norm.
      20th century was a weird outlier in practically every way.

  2. the ultimate code language by sad_ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    you can make it to mean whatever you want it to mean.
    the emoji's have their 'official' meaning, but that can change depending on its use (create a movie title only using emoji, etc).
    or you could create a secret code book made out of emoji characters and then only other people having the code book will be able to 'read' your text.

    it's basically impossible to prove a series of emoji's mean anything.

    --
    On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
    1. Re:the ultimate code language by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The issue here is that prosecutors haven't figured out how weak emoji evidence is yet. They are treating it like other written evidence, when it is in fact far more open to interpretation.

      We have no details of the alleged pimping case, but you would hope that they were not relying too heavily on some emoji to get the conviction.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Re:Emojis in passwords by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Latest advice from NIST is that password complexity requirements shouldn't be allowed. People find it hard to make a password that meets them and that's memorable at the same time. So they generally aren't secure enough ("nameofpet123"), get reused, or even written down on post-it notes.

    Emojis are just data. Since it should be hashed it shouldn't really matter what character set you're using. Security comes from password length not enforcing other complexity rules.

    Password managers are the best way to get people to use extremely long passwords and avoid password reuse since they no longer need to remember them (NIST advice).