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The activist group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence wants Apple to ditch the gun emoji and is asking people to tweet Apple CEO Tim Cook using the hashtag #DisarmTheiPhone to pressure him to remove it from the emoji catalog.
The group's executive director, Leah Barrett, told Fast Company, "The iPhone is ubiquitous. [Guns are] on the iPhone as an option. We thought this was a way to bring attention to the issue [of gun violence]."
She added, "I'd like to think that Apple would put its actions behind its rhetoric. It is seen as a progressive company."
But Fast Company suggests that removing the gun emoji could be a form of censorship, writing, "If a company like Apple removes words from that language, even if they're technically pictures, isn't it censorship? How far does this linguistic adjustment go? If we type the letters G-U-N should they be autocorrected to S-U-N, P-U-N, or F-U-N?"
To be clear, Apple did not originally create the gun emoji, but it has updated the graphic for iOS. It originated with Japanese phone carriers, and is now managed by the Unicode Consortium—a universal directory for all emoji that companies like Apple can choose to adopt, or not, on their devices. Barrett said she was aware of this fact before the campaign launched. "You've got to start somewhere," she said, adding that fellow Unicode gun wielder Google could be targeted by the campaign at a future date. (Notably, Microsoft skirts the gun emoji problem by depicting a toy gun.) (FastCodeDesign)
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