Emojis now influence our courts.

The argument

Emojis perform a much more significant role in society than simple communication. Their growing prevalence in court cases illustrates how they are now influencing legal outcomes where motive is disputed. A symbol that began as decoration in casual messaging has become a thing courts must interpret, because the messages people send are the same messages that end up in evidence. For example, a man was handed a three month prison sentence in France for texting a pistol emoji to a former partner, as the image was considered 'a real threat'. The court was not asked whether a picture had been sent but what sending it meant — whether it was a joke, a flourish, or a statement of intent — and it treated the image as capable of carrying the same threatening force that words would have carried. In the U.S. a man was convicted of murder, not accidental death as he had argued, based on a text he had sent with the 'cross for eyes' emoji with the victim's name. There the emoji did not describe an act but bore on the defendant's state of mind before it, which was the entire question at issue between the two accounts of the death. This is important because motive, or intent, is frequently what the outcome of a trial depends upon. The same physical act can be an accident or a murder, and a threat can be a crime or an outburst, with the difference lying in what the person meant. Where an emoji is the clearest surviving record of that intention, it acquires an evidential weight out of all proportion to its apparent triviality — and, unlike a sentence, it comes with no settled dictionary a court can consult. Emojis are therefore increasingly the key piece of evidence that influences the outcome in high profile legal cases, which is one way they have changed the world.

Context

Emojis are appearing more and more as evidence in courtrooms. A study by Santa Clara Law professor Eric Goldman showed that between 2004 and 2019, the number of reported cases involving emojis had jumped from 1 to over 100.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Criminal cases are very complex. While emojis might be considered as evidence in wider arguments about intent, they are one component of a much wider discussion. Goldman's research illuminates evolving modes of communication. However, 100 cases remains very insignificant within the wider context: in the US there were 81,553 criminal case filings in district courts alone.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Emojis are not the sole factor influencing legal outcomes. Criminal verdicts are determined by a multitude of factors of which emojis are one.