Zipper-mouth face

August 27, 2020 5:39 PM

'This appears to be the first time that a court in Australia has been asked to rule on the capacity of an emoji to convey defamatory meaning...'
posted by Fiasco da Gama (25 comments total)

I am dying to know what this is about but my brain is currently unable to comprehend legal opinions so I would be ultra stoked for an ELI5 version of this
posted by capnsue at 6:15 PM on August 27, 2020 [5 favorites]

Ahh, so that's what all those grey people in those big grey buildings are doing all day long.
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:30 PM on August 27, 2020 [4 favorites]

Capnsue: the case is a lawyer claiming to have been defamed about her professional practice, in a series of tweets, which made use of emoji. The judge is trying 'to determine what the ordinary reasonable Twitter reader would make of the use of these symbols' (18), because there's a question as to whether emoji, as symbols, are capable of clearly conveying meaning about serious misconduct (29). The court hears a number of definitions taken from Unicode ('Collision', 'Face With Tears', 'Ghost'), with elaborations (31-35). The defence argues that emoji, and these specific emoji (zipped-mouth face) are inherently ambiguous, and mean nothing more than a lack of information (37). The judge disagrees, and gives the decision and costs to the plaintiff (50-51).
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:13 PM on August 27, 2020 [11 favorites]

Fiasco da Gama, I don't know how things work in NSW but this reads to me like a preliminary hearing or procedure where the defendant was saying "these claims are nonsense, there's no way a couple of emoji can be defamatory, and the court should throw away the claims before there's even a trial" and the court deciding that it is possible there's enough meaning in the emoji to defame the plaintiff and that it isn't going to throw the claims out right now. Does that make sense?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 7:37 PM on August 27, 2020 [6 favorites]

Yes—on a re-read I think you're right. (I'm not a lawyer).
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:42 PM on August 27, 2020

The ultimate outcome will be interesting.

I wonder if on some level the judges in these emoji cases are thinking "Did I really go to law school and rise to the top of my profession in order to interpret tiny pictures and quote Emojipedia?"
posted by pianissimo at 8:25 PM on August 27, 2020 [8 favorites]

I had suppressed memory of that horrifying McAlpine case that the court cites approvingly. On the one hand, jeepers. On the other, I had not previously considered the possibility that an asterisked phrase like "*innocent face*" would be considered an emoticon, so that's interesting.
posted by Not A Thing at 8:27 PM on August 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

"DISCLAIMER - Every effort has been made to comply with suppression orders or statutory provisions prohibiting publication that may apply to this judgment or decision. The onus remains on any person using material in the judgment or decision to ensure that the intended use of that material does not breach any such order or provision. Further enquiries may be directed to the Registry of the Court or Tribunal in which it was generated."

A fascinating Tort. thanks for posting it.
posted by clavdivs at 8:34 PM on August 27, 2020

I liked the part where the judge decided that the plural of emoji was emoji. It's obviously correct but being able to now site a case in support is always nice, even if it is from a court on the other side of the world.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:01 PM on August 27, 2020 [10 favorites]

So is a singular 21st century hieroglyph an emojus?
posted by drfu at 11:16 PM on August 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

Here is an article on the case itself, for those interested. The plaintiff and defendant are actually both high-profile-ish criminal lawyers in Australia, both known for repping terror suspects.
posted by retrograde at 1:06 AM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Emoji is a Japanese word, so it's its own plural. Though “emojis” is probably as acceptable as, say, “forums” (in lieu of “fora”), English being English. The singular is most definitely not “emojo” or “emojus”, though.
posted by acb at 2:15 AM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

emojipodes
posted by Pyry at 2:55 AM on August 28, 2020 [13 favorites]

> emojus

light gravy, or broth, made from the fluids secreted by emoji as it is cooked
posted by are-coral-made at 3:21 AM on August 28, 2020 [15 favorites]

It's also nothing to do with emotions. It's 'e-moji' (Japanese 'picture-character').
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:20 AM on August 28, 2020 [4 favorites]

The judge is trying 'to determine what the ordinary reasonable Twitter reader would make of the use of these symbols' (18), because there's a question as to whether emoji, as symbols, are capable of clearly conveying meaning about serious misconduct (29).

Recently I did business with a large company whose Slack I discovered carried several Pepe The Frog emoticons. I pointed this out to their Slack admin, who removed them immediately.

It turns out they had been there for a couple of years, and at least two managers had been regularly using them without the slightest idea of what they meant.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:24 AM on August 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

I saw “Zipper-mouth face” and clicked through, hoping for leather gimp-masks or something fun.
I was dissapoint.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 7:38 AM on August 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

Well fuck me if *half an hour later* I don’t get an OUTRAGED email from said colleague (with whom I had exchanged no email since they were in grad school a decade ago, and that was perfectly cordial correspondence) COPIED TO THE PRESIDENT AND SEVERAL OTHER OFFICERS OF SAID NATIONAL SCHOLARLY ORGANIZATION, spewing out 500 words of scolding at my “ha ha” and demanding I remove it as “disrespectful both to me and my university,”

I wish you could have given the only appropriate reply:

🙃
posted by rue72 at 8:19 AM on August 28, 2020 [16 favorites]

Or, as a coworker recently related:
"I told my youngest son [ed. he's 12-13 or so] that he was grounded by text after I found out [whatever he did]... He texted me back saying that I was an eggplant. Kids these days are weird."
posted by pseudophile at 8:49 AM on August 28, 2020 [7 favorites]

Emoji, it would seem, are dangerous to use, as their meaning is ambiguous enough to be massaged by the legal system into whatever they see fit. The precision of language endures in pursuit of self-preservation.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:11 AM on August 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Whew, this is some poor legal writing. For those of you who are NAL, there no rule that says legal opinions have to go on and on without clearly stating what happened. It’s fine to put that in plain English at the top and go from there. I got top marks in law school and my takeaway from this was “something something emoji”.
posted by freecellwizard at 9:26 AM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

The singular is most definitely not “emojo” or “emojus”, though.

Mr. E. Mojo Risin’.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:21 AM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

"I got my emojo 🤐, it just ain't 🤐 for you!"
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:42 PM on August 28, 2020

posted by pseudophile: Or, as a coworker recently related:"I told my youngest son [ed. he's 12-13 or so] that he was grounded by text after I found out [whatever he did]... He texted me back saying that I was an eggplant. Kids these days are weird."


I am an old. I'm old enough to have an internic login. I have been on the web since before it was a web. I too did not know what eggplants or peaches meant. I'm sure there's a bunch more I don't know. Subsequently, I've sort of eliminated emoji from conversations where there may be a misunderstanding, and stick to text characters, i.e., :) .
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 2:21 PM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

I (disclosure - mods, please delete if inappropriate) designed a website for a colleague who researched girls' use of social media and even though the girls knew what the eggplant emoji meant (see Things girls don’t like about social media near bottom right of above linked page) after much discussion, found it was too "obscene" to add an image of the eggplant or any other vegetable (like chilli or carrot or peach) to the website at all, when we ended up with this poster (PDF, 150kb) though we did represent what the girls called "rudey nudey" pictures (tastefully, I hope). It's bewildering to me that an emoji of a vegetable, once deciphered as representing genitals, represents genitals more than its original meaning. In the eggplant case, it makes me think of priapism more than anything sexual.
posted by b33j at 8:00 PM on August 28, 2020 [3 favorites]