Election Open Thread

Take, for example, a hypothetical “male belly dancer” emoji. That exists as a real thing – mainly in Turkey – but it’s not a common thing, even in Turkey. The traditional outfits are different from the female ones. There is no neuter/genderless version. Okay? So how do you handle that? Make M/F/N versions of both outfits? Invent a hybrid N version? Exclude the N version, so that they use separate encodings rather than modifying an N base? None of those are a particularly good idea.

I don’t see why “Make M/F/N versions of both outfits” would be a problem, unless it’s dedicating six whole emojis to this thing being simply too many?

On top of that, censorship is a concern. Emojis get censored all the time. Take my older Samsung phone: It censors three emojis, the flag of Hong Kong https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/svg/1f1ed-1f1f0.svg, the Flag of Taiwan https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/svg/1f1f9-1f1fc.svg, and the Mango https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/svg/1f96d.svg. The first two are because China. The fruit because it’s associated with a certain obscene word in some Eastern Asian languages. So if “male belly dancer” would get used almost exclusively in Turkey, and most people in that country mostly don’t have access to it because the popular brands there censor it, because it’s also a popular brand in certain Middle Eastern Countries where the idea of it is offensive (at least to the government if not the public), then nobody’s really using it and it’s mostly just contributing to emoji bloat. And if they included a “male belly dancer wearing traditional female outfit” you know that would definitely get censored.

So, their solution to that is “let the censors win without a fight”? Fucking cowards.

The above isn’t an argument against including those emojis. It’s an argument for doing so while trustbusting the tiny oligopoly of handset makers and mandating full owner control and customizability of devices, so even if a manufacturer out of cowardice omits some emoji or even ships with a touch-keyboard program that refuses to let you use them even with copy-paste or what-have-you, you can just install a third-party keyboard program and have at it.