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Google is coming for your gun emojis.
A new update for Android users will ditch the handgun emoji in favor of a toy water gun, Jeremy Burge reports for Emojipedia. Burge writes that the official reason from Google for changing the emoji is to "presumably minimize cross-platform confusion."
Jeremy Burge | Emojipedia
What's really going on here is that Google is following the recent trend of tech companies including Apple, WhatsApp, and Twitter in changing their emojis to be more politically correct. Because handgun emojis are unsafe and encourage violence, or something. Apple was the first tech company to replace its pistol emoji with a water gun, partly in response to a series of high-profile gun-violence stories reported in the media in 2016 and pressure from activists to #DisarmTheiPhone.
Microsoft and Facebook remain two of the major tech companies that still use pistol emojis in 2018, but for how much longer?
And with the recent string of knife attacks in London and Mayor Sadiq Khan's calls for knife control, will knife emojis be next?
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