Tweet with a smile: The selection and use of emoji on Twitter in the Netherlands and England

Abstract

Emoji, colourful pictographs showing faces, creatures and objects, have seen a surge in popularity and number in recent years. This exploratory study strives to answer the following question: how and why are emoji used on Twitter in the Netherlands and England? By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, we identified three important factors explaining emoji usage: the individual’s purpose on Twitter, the perceived functionality of emoji and the individual’s selection criteria for emoji. Overall, emoji play an important role in online communication and their use is more complex than their light-hearted appearance may suggest.

Dialogic interaction with diversified audiences in Twitter for Research Dissemination Purposes

“…They are regarded as a writing practice etched into standardised images with potential symbolic meanings that primarily fulfil salutation, punctuation, phatic and emotive functions (Danesi, 2017). As non-verbal cues, they can express intentions and emotions (Roele et al, 2020) that can be considered to be more readily understood and interpreted by diversified audiences reached in the Twitter platform. Kejriwal et al (2021) underline the ubiquity of emojis as visual extra-linguistic resources, which have a distinctively social nature and hold a unique place in online interactions, since they embody a 'shared culture' and the density and diversity of their usage is likely to vary depending on the type of discourse at stake.…”

Communicative functions of emoji sequences in the context of self-presentation: A comparative study of Weibo and Twitter users

“…Moreover, the few existing comparative studies merely examine the use frequency of different types of emoji, emoji sentiment, and to a lesser extent, user intention (e.g. Barbieri et al, 2016; Kimura-Thollander and Kumar, 2019; Roele et al, 2020). The present study broadens this line of research by comparing emoji sequence use on Twitter and on Weibo.…”

“…In contrast, just a few studies compare categories of emoji, their frequency of use, or users’ intentions in different cultural contexts. The consistent findings are that the semantics of popular emoji across Western and Eastern countries are similar and that users largely use them to convey positive sentiment (Barbieri et al, 2016; Roele et al, 2020). Moreover, users commonly employ emoji to convey a sense of intimacy and to clarify the tones of messages (Kimura-Thollander and Kumar, 2019).…”

“…Previous studies have shown that social media users across cultures commonly employ emoji to form informative, expressive, and playful interactions (e.g. Kimura-Thollander and Kumar, 2019; Roele et al, 2020). In addition to using a single emoji to express emotion and substitute for an action or behavior, these users often use emoji sequences when expressing their ideas and opinions, and creating affiliation with others.…”

An empirical study of emoji use in software development communication

“…Several studies have analyzed emoji use, mainly focusing on how and in what kind of devices emojis are used [46,73,27], how emojis could be matched to the context in di↵erent levels and interpretations [75,31,68], and how demographic features might impact the emoji use [40]. Another thread of research investigated emoji use in instant messaging [29,99,51], and social media platforms like Twitter [82,96,87,54,38] and Facebook [93].…”