Hamdan Azhar

Over the past year, we've applied emoji data science to studying topics ranging from Brexit to the death of Fidel Castro to the true meaning of the peach emoji. (Hint: 🍑 almost never refers to the fruit.) Naturally, for World Emoji Day, we wanted to go meta and look at the

“Innocuous and omnipresent, emoji are the social lubricant smoothing the rough edges of our digital lives: They underscore tone, introduce humor, and give us a quick way to bring personality into otherwise monochrome spaces.” Luke Stark and Kate Crawford penned these now classic words in their 2014 deconstruction of emojis

Apple recently came under fire for proposing a change to the 🍑 peach emoji that made it look more fruit-like and less butt-like. “What’s happening to emojis represents the worst kind of gentrification of the internet,” charged Buzzfeed. Mashable was even more dramatic, exclaiming: “Apple just ruined texting.” While Apple

The past week has seen a whirlwind of social media activity around the death of Fidel Castro, Thanksgiving, and Black Friday. We were curious about how people used emojis to discuss these topics so we looked at some data from Twitter. As DJ Khaled is fond of saying, “it’s