The world suffers from miscommunication due to ambiguous interpretation of emoji, explains a soon-to-be-published study:
The study is called ” ‘Blissfully happy’ or ‘ready to fight’: Varying Interpretations of Emoji.”
Authors Hannah Miller, Jacob Thebault-Spieker, Shuo Chang, Isaac Johnson, Loren Terveen, and Brent Hecht, are in the GroupLens Research group at the University of Minnesota. In the study, they write:
“We explore whether emoji renderings or differences across platforms give rise to diverse interpretations of emoji… In cases in which participants rated the same emoji rendering, they disagreed on whether the sentiment was positive, neutral, or negative 25% of the time. When considering renderings across platforms, these disagreements only increase. Overall, we find significant potential for miscommunication, both for individual emoji renderings and for different emoji renderings across platforms.”
The authors have a short online essay about this, too.