Years later, X (formerly Twitter) reinstated the water gun emoji and reintroduced the old gun emoji. The sudden change caused surprise among social media platform users and brought the decisions of the company led by Elon Musk back to the agenda. Twitter first introduced the water gun emoji in 2018.
Why did X (Twitter) switch back from water gun emoji to real gun?
X announced that it had reinstated the water gun emoji, with a statement made by an employee last week. Although the company does not explain the reason for this change, this decision seems to be compatible with other changes made by Elon Musk on the social media platform.
In 2018, Twitter introduced the water gun emoji, following other platforms such as Google and Facebook. While Apple made this change in 2016, Microsoft resisted for a short time.
Unicode Consortium, as the body that decides which images will represent emojis on which platforms, kept up with these changes and renamed the gun emoji as “water gun”.
Emojis are shared universally across platforms through common designs determined by the Unicode Consortium. However, each platform owner decides how to visualize these designs. Therefore, the water gun emoji could be represented by different images on different platforms.
This change of X is currently only visible in the web version. Although this change has not been made in mobile applications yet, it is expected to come to mobile devices soon.
Users showed various reactions to this change on social media. While some criticized the return to the old gun emoji, others welcomed this change.
The change is seen as part of a series of controversial innovations made by Elon Musk following his acquisition of Twitter. Under Musk’s leadership, many changes were made to the visual and functional features of the platform. The return of the water gun emoji is the latest example of these changes.
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