The pandemic killed the emoji 😂, here is its replacement

After emoticons, emojis have never stopped growing number of variations and popularity. So much so that its full integration into our textual conversations has changed its meaning a bit. Some of the most popular emojis see their use and attribution change, under the influence of the younger, more creative generation.

Not a bad joke, despite the publication date of this article. Today, the crying laughing emoji 😂, used ever since to replace the expression “Laughing Death”, and the abbreviations “Mdr” and “Lol”, saw more use. Since March 2020 and the start of the pandemic, its use has drastically decreased. But the pictogram overtakes him and also his main competitor.

😂 is dead, alive 😭

According to the very serious monthly census of Emojipedia.org, the most popular emoji usage curve in recent years has joined the saddest pictogram in our smartphone directories. 😭 is used the most as evoked by the latest study update based on 1.68 billion messages posted On twitter. The 😭 emoji takes the lead with 1.96% of tweets analyzed with the latter, compared to 1.89% for the previous most popular emoji.

Two trends would explain the evolution of use. The first would be about the pandemic. The use of the emoji 😂 has decreased much more since March 2020, compared to previous years. Its use in 2019 continued to grow, while its peak of popularity is currently measured in June of the same year, in 2.43% of the tweets published on the blue bird social network.

The second explanation would be related to the growth of the which emoji, which would have a direct impact on the decline of its opposite emoji. This would not be used as an antagonist, but as a replacement. To explain laughter, the new trend goes through the new visual that could be judged as “more radical”, or after “More nuanced”, as Louise Millon, a journalist from Lemon squeezer.

In TikTok, the application where teenagers are most represented, the explanations of each emoji are a good thermometer to discover new forms of expression with pictograms. “It’s common on TikTok for the laughing and crying emoji to be for baby boomers”said Jeremy Burge, at the head of the site Emojipedia, in a blog post.

After a period of transition, where the emojis 😂 and 😭 tended to follow each other in the same messages, the latter won the battle. “Our generation is very sarcastic”replied a young teenager named Martín, contacted by CNN Business. If older generations are turning to it so quickly, I sincerely hope it is not in a literal sense: that of the social climate.