By one estimate, 10 billion emoji are sent daily. Like the Pac-Men they resemble, they’re gobbling language fast. Consider an example every evidence teacher knows: Is it an illegal threat when what is sent as an emoji of a water gun resolves on the receiver’s device into an image of a revolver? And what about the woman who sent a coworker what she thought was a smile emoji - only to be informed by the coworker’s wife that it was, in fact, a hug emoji, leading to an accusation of flirting?īut the future probably contains more emoji-laden lawsuits, rather than fewer. And even in the era of Unicode, some emoji appear differently on different platforms. Certainly, courts often misunderstand them. Other voices: Rumors of electric vehicles’ demise greatly exaggeratedīut for all that judges are forced to interpret the meaning of emoji, in the academic literature there’s considerable debate over whether they clarify the sender’s meaning - or serve to obscure it. There have been no factual findings, and no final judgment.) Related Articles (This is as good a place as any to remind the reader that the court is ruling only on the motion to dismiss, and in deciding whether to let the suit go forward must assume the truth of plaintiff’s version of the facts. Investors, the court tells us, could have found that statement material, and appear to have relied on it, because the stock price climbed. In the meme stock ‘subculture,’ moon emojis are associated with the phrase ‘to the moon,’ which investors use to indicate ‘that a stock will rise.'” A fraudster may not escape liability simply because he used an emoji.”Īnd what was the meaning here? The court summarizes the complaint: “Cohen was telling his hundreds of thousands of followers that Bed Bath’s stock was going up and that they should buy or hold. We could be more confident that we knew what various messages meant.įor his part, Cohen argues that emoji are inherently ambiguous, so that “a tiny lunar cartoon” has “no defined meaning.” In answer, Judge Trevor McFadden gives us Linguistics 101, that symbols possessing no inherent meaning take on significance according to context: “Emojis may be actionable if they communicate an idea that would otherwise be actionable. Were there no rocket ship or stock chart or money bags emoji - or, in Cohen’s case, no smiling moon - the cases would be simpler, because the parties would have used ordinary language. (According to the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit charged with standardizing characters, emoji is the correct plural - not “emojis.”) This past spring, the Wall Street Journal reported that at the crypto exchange FTX, expenses totaling tens of millions of dollars “were submitted on Slack and were approved by emoji.”īut notice the source of the difficulty. Now, in the first place, we should no longer be surprised to find emoji at the heart of either business communications or litigation. According to the plaintiffs, Cohen was consciously trying to pump the stock, in preparation for selling off his stake. CNBC tweeted a link to a negative story about Bed Bath, illustrated by an image of a shopper:Ĭohen tweeted back, “At least her cart is full” - and accompanied it by an emoji of a moon with a smiley face:Īlthough the lawsuit includes a long list of allegations, the part that has people chattering involves the significance of that image. The lawsuit arises from events in August of 2022, when Cohen still held a massive position in Bed Bath stock.

The wordsmith despairs at … well, the collapse of formal language, the costs of which we will be some while counting. The law professor in me marvels at the way judges must now struggle with the collapse of formal language.

To be sure, litigation following a corporate collapse sprouts like weeds, but in this case both my law professor and wordsmith sides are fascinated by the allegation that Cohen used an image of a smiling moon to boost the stock price of Bed Bath & Beyond, after which he started selling his significant stake. Social media is all atwitter - um, all a-X-er? - about the emoji at the heart of the federal court ruling allowing a securities suit to proceed against billionaire investor Ryan Cohen.

Thumbs up emoji fax meme