Satire- ROFL: Google pips Facebook in ‘emoji’ turf wars
(Valley Trading Web, 27 July, 2020, Menlo Park/ Mountain View): The global Covid-19 lockdowns has deeply changed human interactions in modern society. In midst of new cultural crimes and the dislocation of public resources in fighting the menace of old social disorders betwixt a pandemic, U.S. technology giants Google LLC and Facebook, Inc seem to have opened a new turf war to gain traction within the fishbowl world of their users – political affiliation of emojis.
According to a blogpost by a keen-eyed WhatsApp user and prolific messenger who goes by the moniker ‘monkey see, monkey talk’, the bone of contention between the companies with respect to their ideological standings is made clear in the head-tilt of their use of the emoji that represents rolling on the floor laughing (ROFL).
The user noted in the blog that while the ROFL emoji used by Google in their ‘GBoard’ has its head tilting towards the left, Facebook owned messenger app WhatsApp’s inbuilt keyboard goes with an icon of the emoji that has its head tilted to the right. While this particular attribute that seems random at first glance is easy to miss, it has become a characteristic feature of the emoji’s, and in turn the company’s, political affiliation once it caught the attention of users, with the blog trending across various platforms in the internet by Sunday night.
Facebook, responding to growing criticism of the head-tilt of its ROFL emoji, said in a statement to Valley Trading Web that this anomaly is due to the emojis Unicode in ERLANG, the programming language used to code WhatsApp.
“While to the users view the emoji’s head looks tilted right, to the emoticon itself it is tilting its head to the left. Hence, the correct interpretation in such a case would be different”, the social media company cheekily added.
The blog also pointed out that the ROFL emoji appears with its head tilted to the left in the WhatsApp notification banner of Google’s Android mobile operating system, which mainly uses JavaScript to code its apps, but when the message is opened in WhatsApp, the same emoji appears to the viewer with its head aligned to the right.
“While such considerations could not be used to glean any conclusions, it is interesting to study how such inanimate objects are coded in algorithmic systems”, the blog said.
Google did not respond for a comment.
WhatsApp, which was bought by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, said earlier this year that its user count has risen to 2 billion, becoming the only social media in the world after Facebook itself, to reach that milestone. Telegram, another instant messaging app known for its better user privacy with 400 million monthly active users, doesn’t change the alignment of its ROFL emoji head in app and keeps it similar to Google’s OS, Valley Trading Web found.
(Photo Credit: Pixabay from Pexels)
