A farmer was taken to court by a customer who had interpreted his 👍 reply as his agreement to a contract. The court agreed and made the farmer hand over $62K USD in damages.
Oh, and there’s stuff here about the poop emoji, too.
Somehow I missed this story when it first hit in 2021 (weird, as it’s right up my alley), but a new episode of the brilliant 99% Invisible podcast covered it in detail this week, along with some great expert interviews about the growing prevalance of emojis in court cases – and some insight on the poop emoji, while they’re at it.
In the episode, host Roman Mars introduces us to Saskatchewan farmer Chris Achter, who texted a 👍 in response to a contract for flax. The buyer saw it as a digital handshake. Chris ust thought he was saying “got it.”
Unfortunately for Chris, Justice Timothy Keene ruled that in this context, the 👍 was a “non-traditional but valid response,” and treated it as a digital signature.
Law professor Eric Goldman explains, “There is a freight train of emojis headed toward the legal system,” as courts face the challenge of interpreting emojis in legal contexts.
He says he’s tracked over a thousand emoji-related rulings, with that number rising rapidly: In 2016, he found at least 26 court opinions that referenced emojis. By 2023, that number was over 200.
Noting the way some judges are failing to keep up with the relevance of emojis, Goldman says: “Judges will often cut and paste a chat log, and there will be emojis in that. And then the judges will take them out, and just put in brackets the word ’emoji’, without being specific even which emoji it was.”
The episode also looks at how emojis function in communication. Linguist Adam Oleksik notes, “I don’t think they’re different from words. I think they’re the exact same thing as words — they have such a critical function… They tell you the vibe of the sentence.”
The episode also touches on the technical quirks of emoji design.
A thumbs-up sent from an Apple device might look different on an Android, and even the same emoji—like a gun—can depict a water pistol on one platform and a real firearm on another – such as X, formerly Twitter, where chief twat Elon Musk has changed the water pistol back to the original gun design.
Rounding things off on a more positive note, Roman talks with Keith Houston, author of a new book called Face with Tears of Joy, on the history of the poop emoji.
Houston says the iconic poop’s appearance in the first set of emoji, released long ago in Japan, was likely based on the weird but wonderful fact that the term ‘unchi’ has connotations with good luck – despite it literally meaning poop.
Weirdly, or perhaps not, the notion of poop being in some way cute or lucky or just a good thing to have around made its way into this first emoji set,” Houston says.
I also love this little explainer on the role an actual ‘poop boy’ (above) in the manga Dr Slump, by Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama:
“There is this anime called… Dr. Slump. And one of the characters was called Poop Boy or Unchikun… his friends were Manure Boy, Bird Poop Boy, Old Man Poop and Soft Serve Ice Cream Boy, who the others mistook for poop.”
That last part is… 🤣 too good.
Listen to the episode above, or at the 99% Invisible website.
Note: this story includes affiliate links.
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