Emoji have exploded in popularity over the past few years, becoming synonymous with everyday conversations over social media, from WhatsApp to Twitter to Instagram. Expressing how you feel - be it sad, happy, grumpy and so on - via an emoticon isn't new, but the popularity of smartphones and adoption of emoji has lead to incredibly widespread usage.
Behind all of these little yellow people or scenes is the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit dedicated to "developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data." Creating new emoji is a controversial process and it's largely up to various manufactures to implement the standard. All companies who create software are able to include, or not include, the emoji they want and one that many have chosen to not include is the "reversed hand with middle finger extended" except for one: Microsoft.
Emojipedia points out that Windows 10 now includes support for what many would call the "middle finger emoji". Apple, in its iOS 8.3 update, declined to include this potentially offensive emoji but it seems Microsoft just went straight ahead and included it.
The implementation includes various skin tones, from white to black, and its clear what its meant to show. Whether other operating systems will chose to include this addition remains to be seen, but as of later this year, Windows 10 users can now happily swear at each other via emoji.
Source: Emojipedia
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