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

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.

Comments

Plural Form

[Kunedog]

Whoa, whoa, stop right there. Is "emoji" also the plural of "emoji"?

Re:Plural Form

[mrbester]

It's the Spinal Tap version of more plural, specifically 1 pluraller (in lowercase Roman numerals).

could it be

[renegade600]

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

Re:could it be

[jellomizer]

No, the hieroglyphs were a form of direct language. The Emoji is actually more like a form of punctuation. If you look at President Lincoln's hand written speeches, he notated them with little pictures, letting him know when to look at the audience and where. How to inflect his voice, and what emotions to show.

Much of this informal communication was lost when we moved over to typed documents, this was due to a limited number characters available for a type writer, and printing presses, then to limited the character set in computers to 8 bits or less, due to expense and technical limitations (large and overly complex keyboard).

Now with modern technology with 64bit microprocessors, Gigs of RAM, and video that handles 32bit color at an insane resolution in nearly everyone's pockets. And with a gesture based interface, that doesn't require a physical keyboard. The Emoji is back into our language in a new form.

 

the ultimate code language

[sad_]

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.

Re:the ultimate code language

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:the ultimate code language

[kurkosdr]

Not to mention emojis render differently on different platforms or versions of platforms. If I send an icon of a water pistol from a new phone it might appear as a gun on an older phone. Did I just made a death threat? The emoji name is actually "gun" but many platforms render it as a water pistol in their latest versions because public relations by vendors. As other people mentioned, the English language is getting cryptic and pictographic. Someone should try putting emojis in an EULA, let's see how they interpret this (this should show the pitfalls of using freeform text on contracts)

Re:the ultimate code language

[sysrammer]

I can't wait for the supreme court case over whether it's obscene to put a ":P" emoji next to a poop emoji.

Can't wait to see "Two Girls, One Emoji".

Emojis in passwords

[OzPeter]

This week I had to create an account on an US government website to process some forms. I was surprised to see that as a part of the password recommendations they said that you could use emojis. This was the first time that I have encountered such a clause and it was doubly surprising that it was on a US government website.

I stuck to a regular plain old string of random characters and digits, but I could see how people who think in emoji could prefer an emoji password.

Re:Emojis in passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

It's time to shine baby

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I can finally get my perl6 job

Thanks unicode support

Re:How do courts deal with other ambiguous speech?

[jellomizer]

I think the problem is that emojis are even more ambiguous because the images may be very context sensitive. The High Heals and Dollar signs. Is that asking for money for shoes, asking someone to dress up and bring some extra cash, or a sign for prostitution.

How is that different than text?

[Shaitan]

Tone and inflection are nearly everything. Without them you are very nearly having a conversation with an imaginary character in your mind combined with your own mannerisms and bias. These things are already extremely ambiguous. I don't really see that emoji is worse.