I could definitely see the gun emoji mentioned in the article causing issues in a court case. For example, if two people get in an argument, and one person thinks they are sending a playful water gun emoji, but the other person receives a real gun emoji. The person receiving the "real gun" emoji might feel threatened, even though the sender thought they were being playful. It's like when you frustrate your spouse and they say they're going to kill you; context matters, and some device vendors silently change the context for political reasons.

IANAL, but in my opinion, a gun emoji is not a threat in any isolated context. There would need to be enough other context before I would consider it a threat that the emoji would be irrelevant compared with the other evidence.

I feel like we're overthinking this. Why not just present the court with renderings that would have been used in all devices in question?

I think that's underthinking the issue. It's not just about individual court cases, it's about the dramatic and rapid influence that corporations exert on human-to-human language use. Emoji designs are for-profit investments made by corporations and they are not like normal language.

Corporations are making these emoji and people are using them to communicate. The meanings are ambiguous, never taught in school, tied to profit motives of domestic or foreign corporations, and liable to change at a moment's notice without all parties receiving the same change. It's a mess for future of society and communication, and that it's showing up in court cases with confusion already is a leading indicator that the problems will get worse.

It could still raise the question of whether the sender knew how their emoji would be rendered on the receivers screen. Did the sender know that their water gun would get rendered as a real gun, causing the receiver to feel threatened, or did they assume it would also be a water gun to the receiver, giving off a playful vibe.