Kids Are Facing Criminal Charges for Using Emoji
Emojis are quickly becoming the language of the Internet, but with that power comes a raft of new legal issues. Cases are beginning to emerge in which police charge people  often kids  for using emoji in ways that they deem threatening. According to a Washington Post feature on the subject, a 12-year-old girl in Fairfax, Va. was charged with threatening her school and computer harassment because she posted a message on Instagram that included a bomb, knife and gun emojis and the phrase "meet me in the Library." , Fairfax County Schools ultimately concluded the threat was not credible, but the outcome of the case in juvenile court is unclear. In a separate New York case last year, a teen was charged with making a terrorist threat after he wrote a Facebook post that included three gun emojis pointing at the head of a police officer emoji. The teen ultimately was not indicted on the charge. The incidents illustrate that law enforcement are only just beginning to figure out how to interpret emoji. A single symbol can often mean different things depending on the context in which it is used, and new ones are being added to the popular lexicon every year. , "You understand words in a particular way," Dalia Topelson Ritvo, assistant director of the Cyber Law clinic at Harvard Law School, told the Post. "It's challenging with symbols and images to unravel that."