When to not use emoji?
Last night, during the storms that were taking place, this tweet found it’s way into my timeline by Hackney MPS.
Something awful had happened in Holborn where a section of building, presumably a parapet, fell down on a parked car and killed the poor woman sitting in the drivers seat.
The tweet from the Hackney section of the MPS was the first out there and included two emoji characters the hand together praying and the head in hands smiley. My first reaction to that was it was a bit weird to include those. My use of smileys and emoji is usually on Instagram or Twitter and used in a slightly comedic or playful way, especially the last character, the head in hands. This is usually used as a sign of shame or embarrassment usually posted on a compromising or silly picture.
I still think it’s kind of odd as I’d like to think of a police twitter account as being purely factual and professional and devoid of smileys. I guess the test would be, in my mind at least, whether you would message your boss with a smiley or emoji character.
But then as I’ve learnt before people use social media in different ways than you might expect and what is deemed acceptable is constantly changing. Maybe I’m being too old, miserable and over sensitive but it still doesn’t seem quite right or terribly respectful in this instance. I’m sure other people won’t see it as a problem though.
Writing this post I also discovered a WordPress bug in that it really doesn’t like emoji characters!