Those bullies were gifted a new and more powerful tool. The “like” – the big blue thumbs up that had become a symbol of the social media platform – would be expanded to include a sweet of emojis: love, wow, sad, angry… and “haha”. That year, Facebook made a momentous decision. “When I look at its yellow face, I see the detestable, carefree smirks of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson as they merrily dance through the current chaos – hop, skip and jumping over the cracks in society they’ve helped drive deeper and wider, safe in the knowledge they’ll personally be just fine no matter what.”Īn Irish Times columnist called Tears of Joy “more beastly than any other ” and a “sobbing cretin popular with right-wing bullies and those with no imagination”.īut Tears of Joy soon took a backseat – 2016 was the year of the arguably more divisive Grinning Squinting Face. As she saw it, Tears of Joy had become a weapon of the right in the culture wars. The emoji wasn’t being used to express joy, but hate. It wasn’t just the design that produced such a visceral reaction in Wilkinson, but how it was used – it could be found in comments on stories about refugees who drowned at sea and articles on the rise of hate crime in post-Brexit Britain. “There’s something about this particular character – with its broad, cackling grin and the performatively prominent tears of mirth – that just feels inherently mocking and cruel,” Wilkinson said.
In 2016, Guardian columnist Abi Wilkinson called it an “obnoxious, chortling little yellow dickhead”. Interestingly, “post-truth” won the following year.īut not everyone was besotted with Tears of Joy. By 2015, Tears of Joy had changed the world’s communication and was named Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, the first time an emoji has taken the title. The emoji itself was developed in Japan and in 2010 was part of the first great global emoji cache known as Unicode 6.0 – a worldwide emoji standard, sometimes called the UN for emojis.īut Grinning Squinting Face soon fell into the shadow of its cousin, Tears of Joy emoji, another Unicode 6.0 alumnus, and part of the first batch of emojis available on iPhone. The haha emoji started its life as the innocuous emoticon, XD, during a simpler time where lol, :) and MSN messenger were at the forefront of online communication.
So how did the emoji of joy become the emoji of hate? One columnist called the Tears of Joy emoji a “sobbing cretin popular with right-wing bullies and those with no imagination”. A weapon of the trolls in the time of the culture wars. The emoji of Brexit, Donald Trump and the anti-vaxxers. In a way it has become the emoji of the moment. My experience of social media is now like being followed everywhere by Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons – like every earnest view I hold is a source of belittlement for the world. Even on stories where the comments are turned off, you’ll still find that little androgynous face of scorn. It takes just one person to click that avatar of vitriol and the post and my newsfeed is tainted forever. While I’m training myself not to click on Facebook’s comments section – and that addictive rush of outrage of reading the horrendous views of strangers – the haha emoji is unavoidable. Every time I see that little yellow ball of derision sitting at the bottom of news stories and posts, cackling at the pandemic, climate change, inequality – actually anything where someone is trying to make the world a better place – my faith in humanity slips a little further. Created 11 years ago to express laughter, the emoji – officially dubbed Grinning Squinting Face – has become the emoji of ridicule. Facebook’s haha reaction was developed to enable users to express laughter, but it has turned into the emoji of ridicule and scorn.
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