A few years ago, cops raided the home of a teenager in Brooklyn and arrested him for posting a sequence of emoji on Facebook. Two officers on patrol had recently been killed in the borough, and tensions were running high. The offending post contained an emoji of a police officer followed by three emoji handguns, enough to procure an arrest warrant, apparently, on charges of making a “terroristic threat.” (The teen’s bail was set at $150,000, though a grand jury later declined to indict.) According to the criminal complaint, the images had caused police officers “to fear for their safety.” At the time, Facebook’s design for the handgun emoji resembled a fairly realistic revolver. In 2018, it was remade to look like a neon-green squirt gun. Zuckerberg waves his wand; a felony becomes a joke. Or does it?

In cases of alleged criminality, courts have always been tasked with sussing out intent. The evidence ranges from the verbal (did the suspect tell his friends he was going to rob the liquor store?) to the gestural (did he slide his fingers across his throat?) to the tonal (was he screaming a threat or bellowing song lyrics?). Emoji, with their ever-evolving connotations and dramatic variation in appearance, present a unique challenge. The question of how to interpret them is not just a matter of theoretical inquiry. Eric Goldman, a legal scholar at Santa Clara University and an expert in the burgeoning field of emoji law, has documented more than 150 cases in which emoji appear. Recently, he led an emoji crash course for a group of New York state trial judges. “A lot walked in thinking, ‘What do I need to know about emoji?’” Goldman told me. “And, at the end, they were flabbergasted.”

Facebook isn’t the only technology company that moved its pistol emoji to the toy aisle. Apple paved the way in August 2016, after a string of highly public shootings by police of black men—Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Delrawn Small. The rest of the major technology companies followed suit. By late 2018, which saw massacres at Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Santa Fe high schools, the pistol emoji had, with a few exceptions, been almost completely recast. In keeping with the committed apoliticism we’ve come to expect from Silicon Valley, none of the companies cited gun violence or pressure from activists as a reason for the change. Even if they had, the notion that gun violence can be diminished by eliminating our ability to reference it visually feels tendentious at best. We may as well ask Apple to render the word “gun” with curlicues and flowers.

The most litigated emoji is the plain ol’ smiley, followed by the winky and sad faces.

Emoji lawsuits don’t often involve “terroristic threats.” The most common category is sexual predation, but the cases run the gamut from child custody to workplace harassment to murder. By Goldman’s count, the most litigated emoji is the plain ol’ smiley, followed by the winky and sad faces. In a recent sex trafficking case, the court had to decide whether a crown emoji sent by the defendant conveyed an offer to become a pimp. In 2017, an Israeli couple were ordered to pay damages to a prospective landlord after they sent emoji of a champagne bottle, a chipmunk, and a dancing woman in the midst of an apartment negotiation, communications that led the landlord to conclude they wanted the place, and to take the listing off the market. Then the couple stopped responding. The court found them liable because the emoji signaled “great optimism” and suggested the defendants were acting in “bad faith.” One man’s chipmunk is another man’s security deposit.

For years, the standard view has been that emoji enrich comprehension by helping us to read between the lines. According to a recent study by Vyvyan Evans, a U.K.-based linguistics professor and author of The Emoji Code, a lively volume of emoji ephemera and theory, 72 percent of young adults find it easier to express emotion using emoji rather than words alone. “What we mean is often not what we say, in the sense of what our words literally convey,” Evans notes. Emoji stand in for knowing nods, ironic eye rolls, a tongue in cheek—those bits of paralinguistic information that are not easily conducted via text.