A court in Washington, D.C., has been stuck with a tough, maybe impossible question: What does 🌝 mean? Let me explain: In the summer of 2022, Ryan Cohen, a major investor in Bed Bath & Beyond, responded to a tweet about the beleaguered retailer with this side-eyed-moon emoji. Later that month, Cohen—hailed as a “meme king” for his starring role in the GameStop craze—disclosed that his stake in the company had grown to nearly 12 percent; the stock price subsequently shot up. That week, he sold all of his shares and walked away with a reported $60 million windfall.
Now shareholders are suing him for securities fraud, claiming that Cohen misled investors by using the emoji the way meme-stock types sometimes do—to suggest that the stock was going “to the moon.” A class-action lawsuit with big money on the line has come to legal arguments such as this: “There is no way to establish objectively the truth or falsity of a tiny lunar cartoon,” as Cohen’s lawyers wrote in an attempt to get the emoji claim dismissed. That argument was denied, and the court held that “emojis may be actionable.” (Cohen’s lawyers did not respond to my request for comment.)
The humble emoji—and its older cousin, the emoticon—has infiltrated the corporate world, especially in tech. Last month, when OpenAI briefly ousted Sam Altman and replaced him with an interim CEO, the company’s employees reportedly responded with a vulgar emoji on Slack. That FTX, the failed cryptocurrency exchange once run by Sam Bankman-Fried, apparently used these little icons to approve million-dollar expense reports was held up during bankruptcy proceedings as a damning example of its poor corporate controls. And in February, a judge allowed a lawsuit to move forward alleging that an NFT company called Dapper Labs was illegally promoting unregistered securities on Twitter, because “the ‘rocket ship’ emoji, ‘stock chart’ emoji, and ‘money bags’ emoji objectively mean one thing: a financial return on investment.”
Once seen as a way to flirt over text or to express on social media the ineffable feeling of 🫠, emoji have worked their way down the “adoption curve,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University who has studied emoji, told me. Much like the Millennials raised on the internet who now hold positions of power in corporations, the emoji has fully grown up.
That emoji are omnipresent in the professional world was inevitable, Goldman said, “because that’s how we are talking to each other in the rest of our lives.” In a 2022 survey from Adobe, 78 percent of Gen Z and Millennial respondents said that they used emoji in professional settings, as did more than half of Boomer respondents. Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford who studies the workplace, told me that frequent emoji usage can be charted as part of a broader move in recent decades toward more casual tones in business. That shift has been abetted by workplace software such as Slack, with its chatty norms and many emoji options. (Emoji are, like other characters on your keyboard, standardized by the Unicode Consortium, though the term also is sometimes used more liberally to refer to picture icons specific to whatever platform you’re using.)
Emoji really can speed things up in the office, and slapping a ❤️ or a 🎉 on a message can make a rote communication feel friendly and fun. Their reception is not always smooth, however. Researchers have found that usage of emoji can detract from how credible or trustworthy conversants seem. (And some people are doing little to help their reputation: After Elon Musk took over Twitter, the company replied to press inquiries with poop emoji for several months 😔.)
As emoji flood office chats and personal texts of all kinds, “courts are being flooded with evidence that includes emojis and emoticons,” Goldman told me. In 2023, they appeared in more than 200 legal cases in the U.S., up from 25 in 2016, when Goldman first started keeping track. Over the years, emoji have gotten roped up in criminal and interpersonal litigation such as sexual-harassment cases (one person sending another a vulgar emoji, for example), and in custody suits that hinge on thumbs-up emoji or similar replies. In one prominent example from this past fall, an Egyptian official used a thumbs-up emoji to respond to a message initially forwarded from Senator Robert Menendez’s wife—contributing to the senator’s indictment charging that he conspired to act as a foreign agent. (He has said that he is innocent.) In an analysis of this year’s emoji lawsuits, Goldman found many examples of emoji in such settings as mergers-and-acquisition, trademark, and workplace-discrimination cases.
Emoji burst with meaning: Goldman sent me a thumbs-up emoji when I suggested a time for our interview, and I knew exactly what he meant. But they are also “highly prone to ambiguity,” Marcel Danesi, a professor at the University of Toronto and the author of The Semiotics of Emoji, told me. They might look substantially different depending on what device you’re using, and even an easily identifiable one can mean different things to different people. Consider the Canadian flax imbroglio: In 2021, a flax farmer responded with a thumbs-up emoji to a contract from a potential buyer. The buyer never received the grains, so he accused the farmer of violating a contract. But the farmer claimed that the thumbs-up emoji didn’t mean that he was agreeing to the deal, just that he was acknowledging receipt. This past summer, the farmer was ordered to pay the equivalent of about $60,000.
The possibility of misinterpretation—or plausible deniability—might be part of the appeal of using emoji at work. Just as 🙃 can convey a mysterious meaning in an Instagram DM, so too can it spare a colleague from having to put into words on Slack how she feels about an impending deadline. Emoji have norms, and some have generally agreed-upon meanings. But many, too, are flexible and fluid. 💦 can refer to sweat, meth, or sex, according to a blog post from Goldman.
It’s funny to consider a judge mulling over 😂 or 😉 and all of their possible meanings, but emoji are an issue that the court system is actually well-suited to handle. Courts are already pretty good at evaluating nontextual evidence such as body language, vocal inflections, and gestures such as handshakes, Goldman said. Context, in emoji and in language, is key. Emoji are part of our vernacular, with all of the attendant quirks and slang uses and confusion that come with it. This year, Goldman found examples of heart eyes, eye rolls, devil faces, rats, kisses, and nuts mentioned in lawsuits. In the coming years, as more emoji lawsuits crop up, perhaps no icon is safe. Put another way: 🌝📈💰⚖️🧑⚖️.