Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

Personally I hate seeing this happen both as a specific instance in the case of HK/Taiwan but just in general with corporations and politics.

Professionally and philosophically it's another interesting wrinkle in the implications of the emoji technology.

It reminded of something we saw a couple years ago when Apple changed the depiction of the gun emoji [0]. Interestingly, that blog post's proposed solution (note: same author as the OP article):

> Hide it.

This speaks to how fragile Unicode is, that things that were written in the past may so easily be changed in the future (like the replacement for Taiwan in China) or hidden in various ways. Another article mentions how emoji might be used by e.g. fascists to minimize uncomfortable concepts [1]. Even after you apply Hanlon's razor, there's still opportunity for good old-fashioned miscommunication [2].

[1] specifically mentions the mosquito emoji being introduced for health awareness, but what if we eradicate Malaria or even the mosquito as a whole, and then the irrelevant emoji is replaced with something not widely feared or hated, or maybe even beloved (like another social awareness campaign)? Then there'd be a lot of "Man I hate :positive-thing:" messages out there.

I'm not saying let's ban emoji, it's just interesting to think about. Still, I hope the whitewashing effect mentioned in [1] doesn't gain more ground, here or otherwise.

[0]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ (discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12240386)

[1]: https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/07/the-absolute-denial-of-... (discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17552067)

[2]: https://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-m... (discussed briefly, couldn't find a better thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11446047)

> This speaks to how fragile Unicode is, that things that were written in the past may so easily be changed in the future

Unicode does not define code points for individual country flags. It defines 26 code points "Regional Indicator Symbol Letter A" through "Regional Indicator Symbol Letter Z" and implementations use that to represent two-letter ISO codes as the region or country's flag. To use a more neutral example, one implementation might recognize the combination of SU to represent the Soviet flag while another might not.

This is more than a political dodge by the Unicode Consortium (though it is that too), it also uses fewer code points than the 200+ that would be needed for all countries, plus it allows new countries to be represented without a new Unicode version.

Interesting! Thanks for pointing that out, I did not know that. That being said, it seems like it's an abstraction built upon Unicode, and so can only be as strong (or weak/dangerous/whatever) as that foundation. Even moreso, if it's a convention instead of a standard (which is kinda what those articles are getting at as well: Unicode is a standard, how they are rendered is convention).