Keith Broni is the Editor in Chief of Emojipedia. He oversees the site's day-to-day operations and editoral output, includes researching global emoji trends, monitoring changes to emoji design sets. He was previous an emoji communication consult with the title "The Emoji Translator" and was briefly a meme when he held this title.
"People’s emoji usage is very contingent on demographic factors. We’ve already seen some very amusing cases of differences in understanding with millennials and older generations, the classic example being the eggplant and the peach, and it’s guaranteed to be the same between millennials and Gen Z-ers.
For example, the very slightly smiling face is a prime area of more ironic use than perhaps even millennials realize. It can veer into passive-aggressive territory. Many of the other icons could be used highly ironically as well. The thinking face is going to be a key area of misunderstanding."
“It's actually being used, now more than ever before, as a symbol for laughter,” Keith said. “This is not completely new, people have been doing it for a while.
“With the loudly crying face, the tears are so melodramatic, over the top, that people are saying, ‘This isn’t legitimate crying, it would be inappropriate to use this for expressing actual sadness’.
“Not everybody agrees but people began to say, ‘No, this [loudly crying emoji] is laughter’.”
And to take it a step further, Gen Z are adopting other unlikely emojis to convey humour and incorporating slang terms into their emoji use.
“What we're seeing is the skull and skull and crossbones emoji is also now being used to mean laughter,” said Keith.
“It’s a little striking and when you see it initially, ‘Why are there three skull emojis after this frivolous, silly message?’
“Actually these emojis are being used to emulate the slang term ‘I’m dead’, which is a variation of the term ‘I’m dying’, which is a variation of the term ‘I’m dying from laughter’.