Lawyers Faced With Emojis and Emoticons Are All \_("/)_/ (wsj.com) 123
Zorro shares a WSJ report: Lawyers gathered at the Atlanta office of a big law firm were debating a head-scratching legal question. What does the emoji known as the "unamused face" actually mean? They couldn't even agree that the emoji in question -- it has raised eyebrows and a frown -- looked unamused. "Everybody said something different," recalls Morgan Clemons, 33 years old, a regulatory compliance lawyer at Aldridge Pite who organized the gathering last summer at Bryan Cave LLP, called "Emoji Law 101." Emojis -- tiny pictures of facial expressions or objects used in text messages, emails and on social media -- are no longer a laughing matter for the legal profession. (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.) Increasingly, they are bones of contention in lawsuits ranging from business disputes to harassment to defamation. In one Michigan defamation dispute, the meaning of an emoticon, an emoji-like image created with text characters from a standard keyboard, was up for debate.
A comment on an internet message board appeared to accuse a local official of corruption. The comment was followed by a ":P" emoticon. The judges on the Michigan Court of Appeals concluded in 2014 that the emoticon "is used to represent a face with its tongue sticking out to denote a joke or sarcasm." The court said the comment couldn't be taken seriously or viewed as defamatory. Puzzled lawyers are turning to seminars, informal meetings and academic papers to discern innuendo in seemingly innocuous pictures of martini glasses and prancing horses.
A comment on an internet message board appeared to accuse a local official of corruption. The comment was followed by a ":P" emoticon. The judges on the Michigan Court of Appeals concluded in 2014 that the emoticon "is used to represent a face with its tongue sticking out to denote a joke or sarcasm." The court said the comment couldn't be taken seriously or viewed as defamatory. Puzzled lawyers are turning to seminars, informal meetings and academic papers to discern innuendo in seemingly innocuous pictures of martini glasses and prancing horses.
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Who cares what words mean as long as it gets more billable hours for lawyers and paralegals.
Lawyers can kiss my big purple aubergine! [that's eggplant for the yanks]
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Who yanks their aubergines?!
*_*
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How do words work? It's a miracle!
Defamation??? (Score:5, Insightful)
An emoticon is understood, by definition, to convey emotion.
I get how certain emoticons might feel offensive to some people in certain circumstances, but how can what someone *FEELS* be defamatory?
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You're a hate crime. Stop oppressing me with your continued existence.
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"good reputation" is a FEELING
I had hoped a good reputation is from something objective, like consistent behavior with consistent outcomes.
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Lawyers should ignore emojis like they ignore body language in a recorded statement. It's the words and context of the statement that matter.
It seems that the lawyers did as you suggest - it was the judge that called out ":P" and ruled the comment was a joke or sarcasm.
Re:Defamation??? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I feel (CAR)
I feel (CAKE)
I feel (AIRPLANE)
This is the problem brought on when people refuse to communicate with words, and use little pictures instead.
Re:Defamation??? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the cited example, it was the emotion that made it *not* defamation. If taken as serious, it might have been defamatory, but the emoji declaring it as a joke was how it was made *not* defamatory.
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A feeling can also add something. So if I make a comment and include a feeling that adds a sort of 'wink wink, nudge nudge say no more' to a normal statement, that can be offensive.
Also, 'emoticon' started as ways to add facial expressions, and as they progressed to 'emoji' it became about ideograms as well, to state things that are concrete absent of emotion.
For example, If someone was trying to plan a lunch, and asked me what I thought a coworkers favorite food was, and I replied with an Eggplant emoji,
Re: Defamation??? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're a bit oversensitive if you think that's harassment.
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Eggplant is usually associated with penis, so saying someone likes to eat penis is making assertions about their sex life.
Basically, using slang emoji is just like using slang words, and inappropriate use can be defamatory and/or offensive.
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Eggplant is usually associated with penis
You just made that up, right?
Eggplant is usually associated here with cooking, eating or a scene from a Tony Scott movie.
Re:Defamation??? (Score:4, Insightful)
So contrary to the way TFA is presenting this, the emoticon actually clarified the meaning of the written statement. Which if you think about it, is the entire reason emoticons were invented in the first place. The cases TFA cites where the meaning of the emoticon is ambiguous are cases where the meaning/intent of the written statement was already ambiguous, and the emoticon didn't clarify the meaning enough.
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So if Junta called the cops right now and they figured out who you were and arrested you for assault, you'd feel that was a valid charge?
Or is Junta right that providing context to suggest you statement was not meant to be taken seriously thereby eliminates the criminal act?
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Assault is a threat of imminent violence. You can't actually do that over computer communications.
Statements like "I'm gonna kill ____" are reasonably common and are not normally considered threats. To be a threat, it has to be some reason to take it seriously. If "I'm going to kill you" is followed by address, workplace, approximate daily schedule, etc., the emoticon isn't going to matter.
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Did you write that after POTUS45 (you know - immense hairdressing bill, turmeric-coloured skin) was threatening DPRK with fire and destruction. Or, indeed after the Hawaii "fake missile alert" ?
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If I were a special snowflake, and I thought you felt a certain way about me, my widdle feewings might get hurt!! And I might feel as if I had been defamed by how I perceive that you feel about me, in my over active imagination. And being a snowflake I might be in danger of melting -- thus giving rise to actual damages. Your inner feelings have defamed me. And this gives rise to a cause of action for the complaint, which is the first step of a lawsuit.
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But if I don't like it, I feel that that means my feelings are hurt by your feelings about my feelings.
So jokes on you! See you in court! :-P
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Good thing you included that ':-P', otherwise that might have been seen as a threat of malicious lawsuit.
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It isn't the emoticons but the context they are used. A wink could be a sign of approval or a flirt. Often when things get to the court emotions are normal quite high, so the emotional state of the conversation is important. The not-amused emoji Could be used to explain displeasure of an unwanted advancement, or just not finding that particular comment funny. Or it could be used as a serious face to tell them it needs to be done.
This is often complex in a business environment where the Boss is granted p
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Says someone whose comments are so universally brilliant he (or she) has never felt justifiably humiliated, or excluded from the cool table.
Sometimes our feelings track reality (by some wholly unexpected miracle of evolution), which you might have noticed had you been paying more attention.
The feelings themselves aren't the defamation, they're the awareness of the defamati
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I'm suggesting that feeling insulted, humiliated, ashamed, or harassed is not the same thing as being defamed, and any notion that one might have of similarity arises only from a misunderstanding of what defamation actually is, and their lawyer would probably set them straight long before it developed into a real lawsuit.
Feelings, by definition, cannot possibly be defamatory.... defamation requires statements about the defamed party that are presented as unequivocal truths, and must usually (although not
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Re: Defamation??? (Score:1)
They were not sueing over the emoji. They were sueing over the sentence preceding the emoji. The judge ruled the emoji indicated sarcasm. Basically law doesn't take seriously posts with a bunch of lol speak.
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The judge felt that the the text, if interpreted seriously, was defamatory, however the emoji was indication that it was not to be interpreted seriously. It wasn't the emoji that was felt to be defamatory.
I'm only assuming, of course, that we're talking about the same case. The linked article listed several cases.
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Are these guys serious? (Score:3)
Re:Are these guys serious? (Score:4, Insightful)
I participate in a forum with a very limited number of "smileys", one of which is pretty much exclusively used to indicate disgust. Its bbcode is {crazy}. They mean what the community decides they man, not necessarily what the designers intended.
Emojis are [poop-emoji].
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Using words to convey one's thoughts and emotions has become too challenging.
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Using words to convey one's thoughts and emotions has become too challenging.
Pretty much. Spoken language uses many different signs such as emphasis and tone to convey meaning which is not represented in written language. Some of that can be imparted by punctuation such as "?" or "!" but not all. Emoticons generally fill in the gaps where written language fail for conversational language where someone does not wish to write paragraphs of prose to represent otherwise simple meanings.
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It was subjectively funny, not objectively funny.
Also absolutely no one thought he had actually killed someone.
Words mean things, if you are going to use them, use them correctly.
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The ice-cream part of the ice-cream emoji is exactly the same shape as the poop emoji. There's a great animated gif of this out there somewhere. Not googling it at work. :P
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There's an animated one of a smiley turning green and throwing up, but that's hidden behind a "More smileys" link. IIRC, all the animated ones are (thankfully).
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And if the person using it didn't research it beforehand, the meaning isn't based on that. Just like people use words wrong all the time.
Re:Are these guys serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I lookup U+1F346, then I'll get that it means 'AUBERGINE'.
It will not say it means 'penis', which is what it means 99.9% of the time when actually used.
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And how many of us have named our penis Lord Aubergine?
I named my penis after my college roommate to piss him off. I succeeded.
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Re:Are these guys serious? (Score:4, Funny)
If you have a penis which looks like an eggplant, seek medical attention.
I did and the nurse gave me her phone number.
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What if it looks like a banana? My college friend called it a dongle.
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But does anyone who uses emojis consult an emoji-dictionary before they use one? So what is their intent? What would a reader infer from the emoji in context?
Defamation cases are already nebulous, I think the whole emoji thing is an excuse for what was already a typical problem before emojis existed.
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I don't know about you, but I don't read those dictionaries. I'll admit that I'm nearly illiterate WRT emoji. To me they seem to degrade communication as (or more) often than they assist it. And I feel it is quite reasonable that I have only a vague idea what most of them are intended to represent.
P.S.: There may be dictionaries, but they don't constitute a general agreement. Anyone can put together a dictionary, and if a single word were a decent replacement for an emoji, then there'd be no justificat
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Oh really, what does the "face with tongue out" mean? I can't find a definite meaning other than "it's a face with it's tongue out". What it actually means depends highly on culture and context, it could be a sign of respect in Tibet or a war cry in New Zealand or anywhere from "I'm kidding" to "I'm treating you like a child" in Westerner cultures, it connotation changes with age, even Einstein used it as a political statement and then there is that guy from KISS.
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These are of the sub-species "lawyer" of the human race. This sub-species both thinks they define how the world works and has, at best, a tenuous connection to actual reality. Hence the described problems. (As always, with apologies to those few lawyers that doe not have these issues.)
No shit they're confused. (Score:2)
"What does the emoji known as the "unamused face" actually mean? They couldn't even agree that the emoji in question -- it has raised eyebrows and a frown -- looked unamused. "Everybody said something different"...
Lawyers are people whose profession is to ass-rape verbal and written language to the nth degree. They can pull 1,001 meanings out of their ass with nothing more than a pile of shit with a smiley face on it.
Lawsuit for mental distress you've caused them inbound in 3...2...
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Which font are you looking at the emoji in? It makes a difference.
Emoji are ambiguous. This is largely intentional by the designers, and often by the users.
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Which font are you looking at the emoji in? It makes a difference.
Yes, I'm sure it can. If you ask a lawyer it's the difference between life and death. Or a handshake and rape. Add time of day and sender gender and I'm sure you can carve out another 742 interpretations, which was kind of my point here.
Emoji are ambiguous. This is largely intentional by the designers, and often by the users.
All the more reason they should not be something left open for legal interpretation. The defense of ambiguity should be a catch-all for emojis, full stop. Otherwise, it's nothing but more bullshit to line attorneys pockets with, and overfill an already overtaxed legal s
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I was puzzling over the meaning of \_("/)_/ as shown in my Chrome browser.
A quick search with google finds me this: \_()_/ Which immediately, looks like someone throwing up their hands in an "I don't know" fashion.
Even the humble smiley :) carries a very different face when rendered on different devices. And thus has a different or no meaning sometimes.
It gets worse. The famous pile of poo emoji sometimes gets rendered as a horrible stinky shit with flies buzzing around it. Other times it's a happy smiley piece of shit. A very different meaning is conveyed depending how it is rendered. Perhaps quite a different one that the author meant.
The moral of the story is. Don't use emoji. Use proper language with proper words as found in proper dictionaries. Get your spelling right and be sure the words you are using have the meanings you intend.
Of course slashdot does not render my second example correctly. Which demonstrates my point well. :)
Back talking about your poop. It has been very famously been mistook for chocolate ice cream by numerous people. I, myself remember the first time I saw it wondering if it was poop or ice-cream (it was identical to the strawberry ice cream only brown)- I correctly assumed poop from the context.
The original emoji come from Japan, and some of them are really only used by the Japanese. I think there is one that looks like there is a bit of water coming off the forehead; I forget what it really means, but I
Not even consistent across devices (Score:2)
The best part about all this is that each device can render its own version of these things. Some variations are enough to totally change the meaning, too. (Apple replacing "gun" with "squirtgun", Skype replacing "sarcasm" :P with something that looks more like "nyah nyah, I'm mocking you" type :P, etc.)
Who knew language development was circular? (Score:1)
Peeing on beds (Score:4, Funny)
A comment on an internet message board appeared to accuse a local official of corruption. The comment was followed by a ":P" emoticon. The judges on the Michigan Court of Appeals concluded in 2014 that the emoticon "is used to represent a face with its tongue sticking out to denote a joke or sarcasm." The court said the comment couldn't be taken seriously or viewed as defamatory.
Donald Trump paid me $5,000 to pee on him. :P :P :P
Hillary Clinton showed me her penis at a fund raiser.
Richard Gere bought a hamster off me for $300 so he could stick in his rectum.
Emoji is plural. (Score:3)
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I bet you’re fun when going out for sushis. ;p
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Frankly I thought emoji was already plural, with the singular being "emojus", of course.
Written Chinese (Score:1)
Excellent (Score:2)
Now I'll know to end all my death threats with a :P
I was against (Score:2)
I was against replacing text and speech with pictograms before, but now that I know that lawyers hate them, I love emojis!
If you can't express a thought with words (Score:2)
Call it the 1337 form of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis.
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Americans don't get sarcasm (Score:2)
In my experience online, I find Americans don't get sarcasm that is self evident to British people and this has got me into trouble many times.