The parent poster was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Afghanistan
I can only assume that this is a 3rd rail of sorts for “Western” types who seem to be 100% anti-Iran lately, even though I remember about half a decade ago the same sorts of people were pro-Iran when it came to giving back their money that would eventually be used to fund terrorism, but would love to take Russia’s money for doing the same thing.
Never forget that Biden fistbumped MbS.
Here's a podcast interviewing someone who created an emoji
This is surely related to the political climate but I believe the entities involved applied that change worldwide.
Apple made that change around the same time as the Rio Olympics. In the leadup to the Olympics, there was a push to create an emoji for every event. Unicode 9 added emojis for handball, wrestling, water polo, fencing, etc.
However the almost comprehensive set still had some gaps, because Apple veto'd the marksmanship/air rifle and pentathlon emojis... but not in time to prevent the creation of the corresponding unicode glyphs
Yandex is an interesting showcase of how bad this can get - they literally dropped country borders from their maps last year "for better user experience". And I don't mean just lines that you normally see while browsing the map, but even when you ask for it deliberately. For example, if you look up a city, you get its territory highlighted on the map - but that's not the case for countries, it just puts a marker "somewhere in the middle".
They also removed administrative regional boundaries without announcing that change - probably because looking up regions at the border would have to include a part of said border into the displayed boundary, making it discoverable.
How does that standard apply to Taiwan?
“The maritime border is disputed in a part of the Ems estuary outside the Dollart bay, where Germany has the view that the state border runs on the left bank of the Ems, while the Netherlands regards the Thalweg as its border.
[…]
In 2014 the two nations' foreign ministers met to put an end to the dispute. It was decided that the border should remain ambiguous and responsibility for the region in question shared”
More info (in German) at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch-Niederländische_Grenzf....
They don't, for instance, have the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, instead using the flag of the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.