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

Asmus Freytag (c) asmusf at ix.netcom.com
Sat Sep 3 16:21:22 CDT 2016


I don't think that there should be a place on this list for accusing 
people of dishonesty and / or spreading "neo-nazi junk"; and I don't 
know what the marriage status of the editors has to do with anything.

The central concern of the FAZ article appears to be the role that 
private entities play as gate-keepers of modern communication. That's 
actually a valid concern (see issues like net-neutrality, algorithm 
based search returns and news-feeds and the like). The fact that fine 
distinctions of a technical nature may have been handled with less 
precision than insiders would prefer, is perhaps sloppy, but pretty 
typical for journalism in general.

None of that warrants the kind of loaded language used here.

A./

PS: must admit, I haven't followed the FAZ in a while, so I have no 
personal knowledge of any changes that may have happened in recent 
years, but in earlier times the Feuilleton (the section that this 
article appeared in) used to be fairly liberal in outlook, certainly not 
given to the extremist views that they are accused of here. And I can  
detect no evidence that the charges below have any merit.

On 9/3/2016 9:30 AM, Marcel Schneider wrote:

> ...t there is obviously
> some dishonest handling of core information by the FAZ authors, except
> in the case that they were unable to understand the difference between
> a character encoding refusal and an emoji property value change, or—as
> of the PISTOL emoji—the difference between a character and a glyph.
> ... It seems that this FAZ article was written by some
> unmarried, unresponsive beginners.
>
> However, since they talk of the RIFLE character as if it didnʼt exist in
> Unicode (and not only were “missing” amidst the iOS emoji), itʼs hard
> for me to make any sense except by considering those utterings as a kind
> of neonazi propaganda junk (despite of the renown of the newspaper itself)
> due most probably to the fact that the responsible chief editor was on
> holidays.
>
>



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