Flick through your emoji keyboard on almost every platform or device, from Apple to Android, and you’ll come across a colorful water pistol among the smiley faces and flags. But not any longer on X, formerly Twitter, which has switched the cartoon-like water pistol for a gunmetal firearm that looks disturbingly realistic.
A software engineer at X, owned by Elon Musk, announced that the playful picture would be replaced by an emoji depiction of a Colt M1911. Musk followed up with a reply to say the change had been “fixed [sic] on web, soon to be fixed in rendering on mobile.”
On its surface, the change might appear to be small, but it could have wider ramifications. “The culture war is alive and well in emoji right now,” says Keith Broni, editor-in-chief at Emojipedia, which was first to report the news.
“The pistol emoji is one of the oldest emojis,” says Broni. It dates back to some of the earliest Japanese emoji sets that predate many major smartphones. But the emoji hadn’t depicted realistic guns for years. Until now.
Broni calls the change one of the most significant updates to emoji design in years. Critics of the platform’s direction under Musk call it something else. “It seems consistent with the shithousery we’ve come to expect from Musk, where right wingers are given the nod they can use the N-word, and fascism is given the pass of open carry rules,” says Bruce Daisley, a former executive at Twitter, who left the platform long before Musk bought it for $44 billion in October 2022.
Daisley points to figures like Andrew Tate being able to use racial slurs with impunity in their posts on X as an example of how Musk is taking a much more libertarian view to how people can interact on the platform. He worries that the adoption of the gun emoji is another example of Musk trying to prod and poke at culture war issues. X did not respond to a request to comment made through Nick Pickles, X’s vice-president of global affairs, who has previously introduced himself to Fast Company as the firm’s point person for press inquiries.
A new emoji’s real-world impact
While the update might seem like a game for Musk, the simple act of changing the style of the emoji can have real-world impact. Most platforms and providers, including Twitter, swapped the realistic pistol emoji for a water gun or cartoonish space laser in the mid 2010s. The Unicode Consortium, which approves new emoji, also changed its official designation of the item to a “water pistol” around the same time.
The changes came after highly-publicized criticism of the emoji’s depiction, amid rising gun violence in the United States that saw gun-related deaths begin to tick upwards after almost 15 years of no growth.
“In 2016, after a lot of external pressure from media outlets and social media users, Apple decided to change their rendering of the pistol emoji to a child’s water pistol,” says Broni. “I don’t think it’s too controversial to say that the United States has a very interesting relationship with firearms. Apple’s change of this design was a response to a number of court cases that were beginning to emerge, where the gun emoji was being looked at as whether it constituted a threat.” And because of the ubiquity of the iPhone, where Apple led, others followed.
But X’s conscious shift away from the new standard changes things—and fragments what had been a largely harmonious and homogenous approach by tech companies in recent years. “People use emojis as a community tool,” says Broni. “So the aesthetics, the features, the attributes of that design, have to be coherent for them to have proper utility as a community tool.”
It also increases the likelihood that the gun emoji will, once again, become a symbol of violence and threatening behavior. A Frenchman was jailed for three months in March 2016 after sending his ex-girlfriend a gun emoji in an SMS, which a judge perceived as a death threat. Others, including in the U.S., have been arrested after sending the gun emoji to others, while children have been arrested for perceived terroristic threats for sending similar missives.
“This design change on X almost certainly will lead to people very literally talking about depictions of violence,” says Broni. “To be clear, they could be doing that in a playful manner, but I’ve seen in [Emojipedia’s] mentions that people aren’t inciting violence, but are using the emoji in a way that very clearly is reflective of it being designed as a literal firearm now.”