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

[Marcel Schneider]

Sat, 27 Aug 2016 10:57:24 +1000, zelpa wrote:

>> Iʼm glad of Appleʼs courageous initiative.
>
> If you're talking about the rifle thing I can understand that, but if 
> you're also talking about the water pistol I have no clue what you're 
> talking about. That decision by Apple is just absurd.
>

Well, this precise point is fundamentally out of the scope of Unicode. 
Now since we are on it, letʼs (re-)read on p. 90 of TUS 9.0:

«D7 Abstract character: A unit of information used for the organization, control, 
or representation of textual data.
• When representing data, the nature of that data is generally symbolic as
opposed to some other kind of data (for example, aural or visual). Examples of
such symbolic data include letters, ideographs, digits, punctuation, technical
symbols, and dingbats.
• An abstract character has no concrete form and should not be confused with a
/glyph/.
• An abstract character does not necessarily correspond to what a user thinks of
as a “character” and should not be confused with a /grapheme/.
[…]»

So any vendor is free to choose for a given character the glyph that is most 
appropriate with respect to the business heʼs running. iPhones being typically 
/given/ to children (among other people), it seems to me that they should 
be in the first place when itʼs up to design emoji keyboards.

Kind regards,
Marcel