But emojis aren’t just used to funnel social media users to sign-up pages. Both the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have cleverly used these little icons to raise public awareness about animal endangerment and animal cruelty.

In 2015, WWF ran a fundraising campaign that matched 17 animal emojis ‘living’ on smartphone keyboards with 17 animals living in the wild – and at risk of impending extinction, due to habitat destruction or human consumption. Twitter users who shared WWF’s #EndangeredEmoji campaign tweet, which featured these 17 animal emojis, would receive a month-end summary of how many #EndangeredEmoji they had used, with a prompt to donate €0.10 for every instance.

Some differences, between the sexes, in emoji use do exist. Surprisingly, men tend to use more heart-related emojis than women – even though past studies have found they are less likely to verbally express love – suggesting that emojis reduce the reserve of males in conveying their affections.

In contrast, women – who tend to be more emotionally expressive than men – use significantly more face-related emojis. While these might seem the consequence of different biological make-ups, studies on gendered interpretations of emojis have shown that social expectations exert significant influence.

For example, psychologists have found that in a professional setting, women were perceived more likable when they used highly expressive and affectionate emojis – rather than less expressive but friendly ones – although the reverse was true for men.

When asked to judge two hypothetical messages from co-workers thanking them for covering a work shift, which ended with either an affectionate or a friendly , both men and women better liked the exuberant colleague if she was female, but the modest colleague if he was male.

Accordingly, the American study suggests that women do face cultural pressures to behave more expressively – and men to be more restrained – in both face-to-face and online interactions.

But the camouflaging cover that emojis have provided racial abuse and sexual crime has also enabled information of public interest to evade political suppression.

In early 2020, censors in China erased a published interview with Wuhan Central Hospital’s Director of Emergency Services, Ai Fen (艾芬). The senior doctor had disclosed to state-run People《人物》magazine that she had tried to sound the alarm about a patient suffering from pneumonic infection caused by a SARS-like coronavirus in late December 2019. But she was reprimanded by officials at Wuhan’s health commission for “spreading rumours”, and ordered to notify all her staff not to speak about the illness. Ai said she regretted complying with the gag order, after a number of colleagues – including whistle-blower Li Wen Liang (李文亮) – subsequently died of COVID-19 while treating patients.

Outraged netizens quickly made the text and screenshots of the censored article go viral on Chinese social media, encoding portions of the interview in emoji and fictional languages like Klingon and Elvish, to evade censors for some time.

The use of as a delightfully simple way of communicating the need to mask up, however, riled COVID-19 denialists and others who were ideologically opposed to face coverings of any sort.

In a stroke of creativity gone rogue, some of them hit on the idea of appropriating the maskless ‘Slightly Smiling Face’ for their cause. Paired with the motto #SmilesMatter, a movement was launched to reframe masks as a cruel concealer of human smiles, rather than a simple tool that could reduce viral transmissions, human suffering and save lives.

The anti-maskers had astutely played the gloomy against the cheery . Clearly, the masked emoji needed an update, now that it was used by people who were feeling well but wished to play their part in fighting the pandemic.

Apple was the first platform to officially do so in September 2020, with the release of its iOS 14 mobile operating system, which straightened the emoji’s droopy eyes and blushed its cheeks.

Dim views towards emojis by some members of the literati extended to segments of the general public. Over a third of adults in the UK held the spectacular rise in emoji use responsible for the “decline in the correct use of English”, according to research by YouTube which surveyed 2,000 Brits aged 16 to 65.

But many linguists believe that fears about emojis ruining literacy levels are unfounded. Rather than supplanting natural languages, emojis supplement them – adding tone of voice and emotional nuance to digital text.

To illustrate, imagine you receive the following message: “I tripped and hit my head on your TV”.

As an isolated text, its purpose is not immediately clear. But with the addition of / / / you would probably understand whether the message was meant as an invitation to laugh at someone’s clumsiness, an expression of angst, a request for sympathy/help, or even an appeal for forgiveness (just saying, your television might be running into issues ).

So emojis are popular because they make our digital communications more like our face-to-face conversations. They fulfil some of the functions of gesture, demeanour and intonation – non-verbal cues that some researchers say play a very large role in helping us make sense of our human interactions.