Emojis are a fun way to let your friends know exactly how you feel while you’re texting them, but, can they be harmful? In some cases, interpreting the meaning behind emojis is more difficult than you may think. What one person sends as a funny joke with a smiley face could be interpreted differently by the person receiving the message. In a world full of  miscommunications because of the lack of tone in a text message, it can be hard to tell just what an emoji means.

In this week’s emoji news, a 12-year-old girl has been charged with threatening her school on Instagram due to a post from this past December. According to the Washington Post, the girl posted an ambiguous message under a different student’s name involving several emojis, including the gun, knife, and bomb emojis. The message also had the word “killing” in it, although it is unclear what the full Instagram post actually said. Though the post was not under her name, the girl did admit that she was the one who had posted it when questioned by the authorities.

After the school received word of this potential threat, it notified the police. Police officers got a search warrant and managed to identify the girl through the IP address used to post the image. Once they determined that the threat was not credible, the authorities still charged the girl who posted the image with threatening a school and computer harassment. Her mom claims she was confused as to why her daughter would have posted something like this, but suspects that it may be in response to bullying. One of the biggest questions in the investigation was about what exactly the gun, knife, and bomb emojis really meant and whether or not they could be considered threatening.

Deciphering the meaning of emojis is becoming a growing concern as their popularity grows. This Virginia pre-teen isn’t the first person to get in trouble for posting seemingly threatening emojis online, and she most likely won’t be the last. Almost a year ago, a 17-year-old named Osiris Aristy was arrested after using a gun emoji pointed at a police officer emoji–which the police considered a threat against local officers. During the Silk Road Trial, the judge ruled that punctuation and emoticons were necessary to understanding the evidence presented to a jury, so all texts read on to the record had to include descriptions of the emoticons used. In a case last year, Jesse Enjaian claimed that messages sent to a girl he was allegedly harassing online lacked context when emojis were redacted from the messages. Enjaian argues that with the emojis, the messages took a very different tone.

The problem with emoji interpretation is that their meaning is extremely subjective. While one person might think that adding a winky face to the end of a text makes it fun and light-hearted, the person receiving the text might not feel the same way. The same issue pops up in court cases–does the addition of emojis make a statement more or less threatening? In addition to the question of how emojis can be interpreted, there is also the question of how our First Amendment Rights apply to the internet. Can we really say whatever we want? And where do we draw the line when it comes to threatening or violent speech?

There’s not a whole lot of answers to these questions yet since the age of cyberbullying and emoji use is basically brand new. What everyone should take into careful consideration when texting, tweeting, or posting anything online is the fact that, no matter how funny you may think you’re being, the meaning of your words can be twisted or lost in translation when communicating on the internet.

Alexandra Simone

Alex Simone is an Editorial Senior Fellow at Law Street and a student at The George Washington University, studying Political Science. She is passionate about law and government, but also enjoys the finer things in life like watching crime dramas and enjoying a nice DC brunch. Contact Alex at ASimone@LawStreetmedia.com

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To the average internet user, the exact mechanics of the internet remain a complicated mystery. A certain abracadabra happens every time that I type a website into my browser and hit enter. How does the website suddenly show up on the screen? Where is it coming from? What exactly just happened?

This gap in knowledge facilitates easy exploitation by those with something to gain.

For example, take the Net Neutrality Act: since most people do not understand the concepts of net neutrality, most simply do not have an opinion. Both sides on the issue can say that their stance most serves justice, and the average internet user will not know who to trust.

The intuitive reader can probably guess who stands on either side: large internet providers — like Verizon or Optimum — stand against net neutrality, while hacker-types mostly advocate in favor of it. Maybe one can decide their own stance based on which affiliation they prefer?

But this still doesn’t resolve the ambiguity. Hackers are cool, but also kind of scary and potentially foul-smelling; mega internet-providers are cold and corporate, but it’s so cynical to believe that the oh-so-many people who work at these corporations can all push for a policy they know is wrong.

So, in order to understand whether or not you support net neutrality, we will need to understand the internet a little better. Don’t worry, things won’t get too complicated — even after writing this, I still kind of think the internet works via abracadabra.

What is happening when I type a website into my browser? With net neutrality, when you type a website into your browser, the internet service provider cannot block a website or discriminate with respect to the speed of service — i.e. allow certain websites to have faster service than others. Think of a highway: net neutrality says that internet providers cannot divide the highway into a fast lane and a slow lane. All websites travel at the same speed and an internet provider cannot cherrypick certain websites that receive preferential or detrimental treatment.

What do internet providers want? Internet providers argue that they do have the right to allow some websites to reach users at a faster speed than others. Providers say that if certain websites hog up bandwidth, internet providers should be allowed to charge these websites a greater fee for faster service. Additionally, they argue that the market will correct for any inefficiencies created by these discriminatory practices — if one internet service provider slows access to popular websites, the user will switch to another internet provider that does not.

What do net neutrality proponents want? Those in favor of net neutrality argue that an open internet cultivates innovation. For example, in a world without net neutrality, a company seeking to challenge Google would have to face the additional hurdles. Google can afford to pay for the fast-lane highway service while this new startup will likely have to try to compete using slower speeds. Additionally, those in favor of an open internet point to the potential abuse by internet service providers. For example, many internet service providers also offer On Demand video products which compete with Netflix and Hulu. Without net neutrality, these service providers can slow the access to Netflix or Hulu to try and push users into using their own products.

So, what do you think? Should the internet be a highway where all websites travel at the same speed or should there be a fast lane and a slow lane, with internet service providers charging a higher fee for fast-lane service? The choice will have tangible consequences on your internet speed, the ability of startup companies to compete, and how much you pay for access to many populate sites.

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Imran Ahmed is a writer living in New York City whose blog explores the legal implications of social media and the internet. Contact him via email here.

Featured image courtesy of [OpenMedia via Flickr]

Imran Ahmed

Imran Ahmed is a writer living in New York. Contact Imran at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post What is Net Neutrality & Why Should You Care? appeared first on Law Street.

Good morning loves! How many of you have been staying off the internet this week, thanks to my post on Tuesday? LOL none of you. Just kidding! If anything, you’re all hitting the interwebs harder than usual. This Pacific Standard piece is BLOWING UP. The number of response pieces it’s triggered is seriously impressive.

So! I’d say the theme of cyberspace this week is — women face crazy harassment online and it’s seriously a problem. Like, for serious.

So let’s ride that wave, shall we? Because some awesome, hysterical things are happening. Specifically, this.

A dude Reddit user named OKCThrowaway22221 (apparently Reddit is the place where our middle-school, AIM usernames live on?) decided to conduct a little experiment. He had this hypothesis that women totally have it easier in the world of online dating, so he made a fake profile as a lady, and decided to see what would happen.

This guy lasted TWO HOURS. That is all. That is how traumatizing the results of his little experiment were. SO BAD, that he had to quit after only two hours.

In his words, here’s what happened.

“Before I could even fill out my profile at all, I already had a message in my inbox from a guy. It wasn’t a mean message, but I found it odd that I would get a message already. So I sent him a friendly hello back and kind of joked that I hadn’t even finished my profile, how could he be interested.”

Yes, how COULD he be interested? Probably because he doesn’t give a shit what your profile says, champ. He thinks you’ve got a vagina and he wants to use it.

It gets worse. As OKCThrowaway22221 filled in the profile, the messages were literally coming in faster than he could keep up with them. Again, from guys who knew absolutely NOTHING about the person they were messaging, other than the fact that were was allegedly a vagina involved. It got old pretty quick.

“At first I thought it was fun…but as more and more messages came (either replies or new ones I had about 10 different guys message me within 2 hours) the nature of them continued to get more and more irritating. Guys were full-on spamming my inbox with multiple messages before I could reply to even one asking why I wasn’t responding and what was wrong. Guys would become hostile when I told them I wasn’t interested in NSA sex, or guys that had started normal and nice quickly turned the conversation into something explicitly sexual in nature. Seemingly nice dudes in quite esteemed careers asking to hook up in 24 hours and sending them naked pics of myself despite multiple times telling them that I didn’t want to.”

OKCThrowaway22221 found the whole situation pretty upsetting.

“I would be lying if I said it didn’t get to me. I thought it would be some fun thing… but within a 2 hour span it got me really down and I was feeling really uncomfortable with everything. I ended up deleting my profile at the end of 2 hours and kind of went about the rest of my night with a very bad taste in my mouth.”

OKCThrowaway22221 came away from his experiment with a different conclusion than he’d expected — that women actually have a harder time in the online dating world. Yep, it’s rough shit being harassed by gazillions of guys during all hours of the day. Emotional tolls are taken — and hopefully that’s all.

But our friend over at Reddit isn’t the only person who’s conducting online dating experiments. There’s also Cracked writer Alli Reed, who wanted to test her own hypothesis — that men will literally message any woman with a profile. Hoping she was wrong, she created a fake profile for The Worst Woman in the World, AKA AaronCarterFan. Here it is. Prepare to laugh your ass off/puke all over your laptop.

She’s the worst, am I right? No one would ever want to date her! Definitely not. But they did.  She got 150 messages in 24 hours.

So, Alli decided to add another approach to her experiment. With her reply messages, she’d have to convince these guys that she was, in fact, The Worst Woman in the World. After all, maybe these guys didn’t actually read the profile?

She bragged about bullying children, she boasted about the skill with which she could fake being pregnant to exhort money from unsuspecting suitors. She even asked one guy to let her pull out his teeth.

NO ONE WAS DETERRED. Everyone still wanted a piece of the diabolical AaronCarterFan.

Alli’s takeaway was seriously kindhearted. Here’s her advice to the douchenozzles who were interested in her evil creation.

“Men of the world: You are better than this. I know many of you would never message AaronCarterFan, but many of you would, and a whole bunch of you did. You’re better than that. There are women and men out there who are smart, and kind, and challenging, and honest, and a lot of other really positive adjectives. You don’t want someone who will pull out your teeth and then sue you for child support; you deserve someone who will make you want to be better than you are, and will want to be better because of you. You deserve happiness, and love, and adventure. Be brave. Don’t settle.”

She’s a really nice lady, am I right? I’d love to be her friend.

BUT. I’m calling bullshit on the idea that the most important thing we can take away from these two online dating experiments is that men are shallow and dumb and maybe have low self-esteem. This is true. Some men do struggle with these challenges. The struggle is real, and we feel your pain, guys. We really do.

But. We’re not talking about destructive relationship patterns or unfortunate, self-sabotaging behavior. We’re talking about internet harassment. So here’s the big takeaway, folks.

Drumroll, please.

Men objectify women to a disturbing degree. The reason they’ll message a woman whose online dating profile isn’t filled out yet is the same reason they’ll message a woman whose profile clearly shows that she’s The Worst Woman in the World.

They don’t care who you are. The fact that you are a person, with real thoughts and feelings, doesn’t matter to them. You’re really just a sex toy. The equivalent of a super awesome blow-up doll. An object.

This is you. Courtesy of Jes via Flickr.

Feminism in the U.S. has made a ton of major gains over the last century. We’ve earned the right to vote, the right to an education, the right to play sports, the right to hold jobs, and the right to own property. In some states, we even have the right to control our own bodies. Because of all these gains, we’re often told that feminism is done. It’s over. It’s served its purpose, its goals have been met, and we can all ride off into the gender equality sunset.

But that’s a load of shit, designed to keep women from continuing to fight the feminist fight. Society’s true colors come out on the Internet, where anonymity and a lack of accountability invite everyone to drop their inhibitions. You don’t have to pretend to be PC on OKCupid. You can be who you really are, and no one will be the wiser.

You can demand sex and naked photos from a woman you don’t know — and get supremely pissed when she says no. You can be your douchiest, most asshole-iest self.

So loves, do me a favor. Keep fighting the good fight. OKCThrowaway22221 and AaronCarterFan clearly prove that it’s not over.

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Hannah R. Winsten (@HannahRWinsten) is a freelance copywriter, marketing consultant, and blogger living in New York’s sixth borough. She hates tweeting but does it anyway. She aspires to be the next Rachel Maddow.

Featured image courtesy of [me and the sysop via Flickr]

Hannah R. Winsten

Hannah R. Winsten is a freelance copywriter, marketing consultant, and blogger living in New York’s sixth borough. She hates tweeting but does it anyway. She aspires to be the next Rachel Maddow. Contact Hannah at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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