Rifle Emoji Deleted After Pressure From Tech Companies
It was banished after Apple reportedly voiced concern.
— -- There's an emoji for almost everything now -- from robots to tacos to lollipops -- but the one emoji that recently got the cut: a rifle.
Members of the Unicode Consortium, the group overseeing emoji standards across platforms, removed the rifle from the upcoming Unicode 9.0, which includes 72 soon-to-be-released characters, after Apple, a voting member of the group, reportedly voiced concern. The depiction for modern pentathlon, which shows a man firing a pistol, was also removed. ABC News has reached out to Apple for comment.
The Unicode Consortium is comprised of various technology companies and organizations who gather to consider emoji candidates, including Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Members then vote on them and choose descriptions for the next batch of emoji, such as a "grinning face with smiling eyes."
From there, Apple, Google and Microsoft, which oversee the three biggest mobile platforms, are free to put their own design touches on the emoji before deploying them to users, which accounts for the variations in emoji design.
While the rifle and pentathlon won't be shown as colorful emoji, Emojipedia reports the characters may still be encoded as pictographs due to their last minute removal from the update.