Happy face! 😀 I didn’t realize this until this week, but today is World Emoji Day 2024! Here’s why it matters from an eDiscovery perspective. 🙂

As discussed here, World Emoji Day is a celebration of the emoji and its powers of communication. Using very little but conveying so much, the emoji has become a staple of all sorts of human interaction. From texts to movies, there is almost nowhere that the emoji hasn’t been. Every day, billions of emojis are sent and received for just as many different reasons. There’s an emoji for everything and more are created all the time. Emojis are a fun and convenient way of adding emotion to text-based messages at their core and in this purpose, they excel. ❤️

Note that the quote said “emojis”, not “emoji”. Some consider the plural of emoji to be emoji, not emojis. Either is correct, according to both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.  So, there is no wrong way to say the plural of emoji! 👍

Either way, emojis were invented in 1997 by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese designer, who created 176 different emojis that represented objects, expressions, and the weather. This first batch of emojis was created for an online messaging service. Emojis spread rapidly in Japan because people enjoyed being able to add extra layers of emotion to their messages as well as being more expressive. The increased usage of emojis around the world was largely driven by an uptick in cell phone accessibility and the subsequent rise of instant messaging apps. 🤔

How much has the usage increased? Well, over 10 billion emojis are sent every day across the world. 91% of emoji users agree that emojis make it easier for them to express themselves. And 73% of surveyed emoji users believed that adding emojis to your messages makes you cooler, friendlier, and funnier. 😎

Why should you care from a litigation and eDiscovery standpoint? Because emojis are evidence! Because they are evidence, they are being referenced more and more often in litigation cases. Eric Goldman, who is the Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law, has been tracking cases involving emoticons and emojis on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog since 2004. In 2014, there was one case involving emojis (5 involved emoticons). In 2023, that number rose to 216 cases (9 involved emoticons). 😮

One of those cases in 2023 was the In re Bed Bath & Beyond Corp. Sec. Litig. case, involving the use of the smiley moon emoji and whether it sent a message to investors to buy Bed, Bath & Beyond (which I covered here). 😁

So, you want to have a plan for addressing emojis in eDiscovery. Because they’re not going away! ⏳

BTW, why is July 17 World Emoji Day? This date was first used by Apple as a reference to when iCal for Mac premiered at MacWorld Expo in 2002. Since 2014 Emojipedia has celebrated World Emoji Day on July 17, because of this emoji. So, enjoy World Emoji Day 2024! 🤩

So, what do you think? Did you know that today is World Emoji Day 2024? You do now! 🤣 Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.