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Twitter gets the magnificent trio of sass-filled emoji

Twitter gets the magnificent trio of sass-filled emoji

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Twitter is expanding its emoji lineup to include “all the new emoji” (aka Emoji 5.0), designer Bryan Haggerty announced via the site today. Sadly the update hasn’t rolled out to every user yet, and it’s worth double-checking that you have the latest updates to Twitter apps for your device of choice.

With the update, Twitter users will have access to more inclusive emoji options for gender and skin tones. Fittingly for Twitter, the update also includes some of the sassiest icons that exist: the raised eyebrow, the hand giggling emoji, and — my personal favorite — the shush emoji.

The best Twitter advice I’ve ever read is “never tweet,” but even I can’t resist the siren song of the 140-character missive. I’ve got a brand to build, people. But this mild little shusher is here to gently notify our friends, foes, and sometimes ourselves, saying “you’ve done a bad tweet. It’s time to step away.”

I think about this brilliant piece by Luke O’Neil on “the ratio” — how many likes or retweets you’re getting vs. straight up replies — several times a week. I wonder if we will see a new metric: how many people responded with “shush”?

So far I’ve been able to successfully deploy some choice icons — the barfing guy, the middle finger (oh boy, aren’t we all just so glad that exists on Twitter) in my natural skin tone, and the shusher — without problem.

According to Emojipedia, many of these emoji for this update “rely on characters which are part of Unicode 10.0. Some vendors now support this update, with the majority expected to have support by the end of 2017.”

Correction: This story previously stated that emoji were capable of throwing shade. The Verge was ruled incorrect in Shade Court. We plan to appeal.