Credit: https://twitter.com/Microsoft
The list of companies to ditch the gun emoji seems to be swelling by the day. Just this week Google announced that it will no longer use the gun emoji; preferring the water pistol to it. Hot on the heels of that decision is Microsoft—the software giant is finally confining the pistol to the history bin.
A preview of Microsoft’s new emoji was show on Twitter on Friday with the company claiming its decision was based on feedback it got from people. In the tweet, Microsoft said: “We are in the process of evolving our emojis to reflect our values and the feedback we’ve received.” The company went ahead to show a preview of what to expect when the replacement is finally available.
As you can see in the image above, the new water pistol emoji from Microsoft is spotting a combination of green and yellow—almost identical to what we have seen with Google and Twitter.
This is just a preview of what to expect, perhaps, a couple of minor changes here and there could still be made before the final unveiling. That said, the announcement narrows down the number of companies yet to replace the gun emoji.
Two years ago, Apple became the first of major tech companies to replace the rifle with the water emoji. The move at the time was not popular with other tech giant—and even though others didn’t buy the idea at the time, everyone seems to be embracing the idea now.
Facebook is also thinking along that line too. The social media giant, according to Emojipedia confirmed moves to replace the gun emoji with a toy gun.
According to a Facebook spokesperson, the decision to change to minimize a situation where a user may pick a toy gun from a native emoji keyboard on other platforms such as Google, Apple or Samsung devices and show it as a weapon on Facebook.
Some weeks ago, Twitter replaced its gun emoji with a water gun emoji in an apparent move aimed at sending the right message to its community that the microblogging company wants to get rid of harassment from its platform.
The Twitter gun emoji is popular for the wrong reasons, and now Twitter has replaced it with a water gun emoji. That is more like it considering the number of issues it [the gun emoji] keeps generating on the Twitter platform.
Twitter is struggling to deal with harassments on its network. The gun emoji was a strong source of online harassment before the replacement, and the microblogging company may just have made one of its biggest moves to deal with the problem.
It is only a matter of time until Facebook makes that much expected announcement, and that will very much complete the circle of tech giants that now use the new water emoji on their network.
