"Woke Mind Virus": Elon Musk Shares How Gun Emoji Changed Over Years Across Platforms

Billionaire Elon Musk in his recent post on X shared how Gun emojis have changed since 2013 across several social media platforms. He posted an image which shows the emojis changing from real to water guns on most platforms. 

Mr Musk wrote, "Nerfing of the gun emoji matches the rise of the woke mind virus, as a core tenet is equating fake harm with real harm."

See the post here:

Reacting to Mr Musk's post, a user wrote, "I love how they removed the gun emoji but left the bomb emoji in with a bunch of other deadly weapons."

Another user commented, "Reject modernity, return to tradition."

"stigmatizing guns as murderous demonic totems with free will is central to contemporary leftism," the third user remarked. 

The fourth user questioned, "I'm all for freedom of expression and the ability to use gun emojis but aren't there bigger things in the world to worry about than a gun emoji or lack thereof?"

"The longer time passes the more I'm convinced the woke mind virus is not an isolated incident - but rather a movement that went largely uncontested due to massive repression of free speech. Wild how it propagated society," the fifth user wrote. 

X changed the green and orange water gun to a regular handgun in July 2024. An X employee also announced the change in a post. However, the company did not explain the change. "update announcement: on x dot com (the website), the gun emoji was returned back into its rightful form: an m1911," the post read. 

Emojis are universal in that they share standard codes across platforms (for example, U+1F52B represents the water pistol), as determined by the Unicode Consortium. However, each platform has the freedom to choose how these emoji are visually depicted. This is how incidents like the Great Cheeseburger Emoji Debacle, which was finally resolved in November 2017, come about.