X replaced the water pistol emoji with a regular gun, for some reason

Metavives July 24, 2024

Image: The Verge

Years after Twitter replaced the pistol emoji with a green-and-orange water gun, X has decided to change it back to a regular handgun. An X employee announced the change in a post last week.

The company hasn’t explained the change, but it feels on-brand for Elon Musk’s social network. Twitter originally switched its emoji to display a water gun in 2018, following others like Google and Facebook. (Apple made the switch in 2016; Microsoft was a brief hold-out.)

*We’ve embedded a screenshot of the X post, so you can see the gun image. (On some devices,* *the actual post* *still shows a water gun when embedded.)*

Eventually, the Unicode Consortium, which decides which emoji get made in the first place, followed the platforms’ lead and officially renamed the pistol emoji as “water pistol”:

The Unicode website shows water pistol is the official short name for emoji #1121. — *The current entry for the “water pistol” emoji. You can also find references to it* *here* and *here*.

Emoji are universal insofar as they share common designations across platforms (U+1F52B is the water pistol), which are decided by the Unicode Consortium. But it’s up to each platform owner to decide how they’re visually represented. That’s how we got the Great Cheeseburger Emoji Debacle that was resolved in November 2017.

You’ll only see the gun if you’re looking at X on the web — as of this writing, it doesn’t appear to have updated in mobile versions of the app, though that’s apparently on its way at some point.