The talk began yesterday when one user tweeted the image, according to Fast Company.
🏳️🌈⃠
— mitchell (Discovered 🏳️🌈⃠) (@mioog) February 19, 2019
On iPhones, the tweet showed the crossed-out circle on the LGBT flag emoji.
» New emojis are coming for 2019, include service dogs, inclusivity, sloth
This is a bit of text trickery. The crossed-out circle is a special character that covers the previous letter or emoji. If you copy and paste it, the circle covers any previous character, not just the rainbow flag emoji.
Jeremy Burge, who lists his title on Twitter as “chief emoji officer” for Emojipedia, set the record straight, saying, “it's literally how that character works in combo with any emoji or character.”
🙄
— Jeremy Burge 🐥🧿 (@jeremyburge) February 20, 2019
- not a glitch
- it's literally how that character works in combo with any emoji or character
- if covering this, at least pick a helpful angle: "people have been duped into *thinking* there is a so-called 'anti-lgbt' emoji but there is not" pic.twitter.com/OIIlDStbFL
Burge pointed out that in situations like this, it can be hard to differentiate which Twitter users have been genuinely fooled and which ones are pretending to be fooled as a joke. See for yourself:
Homophobes and homosexuals when they discovered the 🏳️🌈⃠ emoji pic.twitter.com/wsSb9A0mCB
— 𝙲𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚘𝚜 𝙰𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚘 𝚁𝚘𝚍𝚛𝚒𝚐𝚞𝚎𝚣🕊 (@solracodnamra98) February 19, 2019
gays obsessed w the 🏳️🌈⃠ emoji pic.twitter.com/LgswcV01UR
— Worst Bastard Ever☭🦋 (@ComradeMinghao) February 19, 2019
me online: 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
— Luis💕 (@luisortiza13) February 19, 2019
me with my parents: 🏳️🌈⃠ 🏳️🌈⃠ 🏳️🌈⃠
🏳️🌈⃠ why is this emoji even a thing?! This just makes me so mad.....
— Skai Jackson ♡ (@skaijackson) February 19, 2019
loki and valkyrie: 🏳️🌈
— teja (@trivksterloki) February 20, 2019
the mcu: 🏳️🌈⃠
Everyone:
— Boston (@Esnystarlight) February 20, 2019
Republicans: 🏳️🌈⃠
The special character is part of Unicode, which is a standard set of characters computers use to handle text. The latest version contains more than 137,000 characters to handle languages from English to Arabic as well as emoji and symbols.
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