Anyone who has been joining the emoji revelers today has probably been wondering why you can't type the middle finger emoji on Twitter. If you've downloaded the new iOS 9.1 update, you already know the full glory of the new middle finger emoji. No longer will we have to settle for the angry face, stop sign, and ghost emoji to wound our friends' prides for disagreeing with our fave pizza toppings — we can just stick 'em up old school style the way those artichoke-loving freaks deserve.
Unless, that is, you're trying to shut them down on Twitter. You'll notice that any time you try to tweet the middle finger emoji, it will just turn into a vague flesh-colored square. Not exactly the "WHAT NOW, PUNK?!?!" you were looking for. I feel your sorrow, guys — we've waited so patiently, and pent up all these middle finger emoji feelings for so long, that it's hard to imagine that we have not conquered all of the ground necessary to fully win this battle.
In case you haven't logged onto Twitter and seen what it turns into for yourself, here's what the middle finger emoji looks like when you type it from the new emoji update:
And when people figure out what happened, it's inevitably leading to reactions like this:
So ... what gives?
Turns out Twitter isn't censoring the middle finger emoji in an attempt to ~shield our eyes~. (You might have actually noticed that there are very few regulations on things getting censored on Twitter compared to other social media platforms.) In fact, it isn't just the middle finger emoji that won't pop up — the cheese one is missing too, and I'm guessing plenty of other new ones from the update won't show up yet either.
There's actually a relatively simple explanation as to why this is happening. Apple updates and bestows new emoji upon us, and Unicode decides which emoji show up in their "set". Each platform (Twitter, Facebook, and iOS, for example) gets to decide what the emoji is going to look like on their individual site. So although these new emoji were approved by Unicode, odds are Twitter has not yet figured out what they want it to look like on their own site.
TL;DR: Twitter hasn't made its own version of the middle finger emoji yet, and we're just going to have to sit tight until they do.
In the meantime, I'm going to be too busy spamming everyone I know with random texts of tacos, middle fingers, cheese, and unicorns to worry too much about it. Follow your emoji bliss, y'all.
Images: Pexels; Giphy
