Comment in a leading German newspaper regarding the way UTC and Apple handle Emoji as an attack on Free Speech

[Marcel Schneider]

This FAZ article adds to the examples of todayʼs poor IT journalism in 
European newspapers, especially the most renowned ones. Despite of an
occasionally misused literary background, authors are deliberately ignoring
more up-to-date sources, among which:

http://www.dezeen.com/2016/08/02/apple-swaps-revolver-emoji-water-pistol-ios-gun-violence/

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/thanks-to-apples-influence-youre-not-getting-a-rifle-emoji

Iʼm glad of Appleʼs courageous initiative. 
It was only about removing the emoji property. Finally itʼs up to the vendors 
to endorse what their emoji keyboards will be looking like.

More generally, it isnʼt as if Unicode and big tech companies were good to 
wrap up in colorful emoji all and everything people darenʼt write out with words.

Marcel

On 26/08/16 12:57, Karl Pentzlin wrote:
> Today in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", one of the leading
> German newspapers: The comment regards an UTC decision to refuse the acceptance
> of emojis for Olympic rifles, as well as the fact that Apple's IOS 10 displays
> U+1F52B as a toy water pistol, as an attack on Free Speech:
> 
> http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/apple-emojis-die-zensur-der-symbole-14404026.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2
> 
> "Das Unicode-Konsortium wirkt wie eine Neuauflage des Orwellschen Wahrheitsministeriums,
> das die englische Sprache durch eine um schädliche Begriffe gereinigte, neue Sprache
> ersetzte und die übriggebliebenen Worte „unorthodoxer“ Nebenbedeutungen entkleidete."
> 
> ("The Unicode Consortium appears like a reissue of Orwell's Ministry
> of Truth, which replaced the English language by a new one, sweeped clean
> from harmful terms, and which removed "unorthodox" connotations from
> the rest of the words.")
> 
> - Karl Pentzlin
> 
>