X brings back the classic image of the gun as an emoji, forgoing the watery one

By: Vlad Cherevko | today, 13:55
X brings back the classic image of the gun as an emoji, forgoing the watery one

After years of using the water gun emoji, X has decided to bring back the image of a regular gun. This change was announced by an X employee in a post last week.

Here's What We Know

The company hasn't explained the reasons behind the decision, but it's in line with Ilon Musk's social network branding style. Twitter originally replaced the gun emoji with a water gun in 2018, following the lead of Google and Facebook, which had done so previously. Apple switched to the water pistol in 2016 and Microsoft also joined the initiative soon after.

The Unicode Consortium, which defines emoji standards, has also renamed the gun emoji to "water gun." However, it is up to each platform to decide how to visually represent the emoji. At the time of writing, the change was only visible in the web version of X, but not in mobile apps. The update is expected to arrive on mobile devices soon.

Source: @yacineMTB