![]() ![]() "There's something about this particular character - with its broad, cackling grin and the performatively prominent tears of mirth - that just feels inherently mocking and cruel," Wilkinson wrote.Įmojis and emoticons were invented to remove the ambiguity from text-based conversations. In a 2016 Guardian piece, Abi Wilkinson raised similar complaints about how some jerks were using the crying-with-laughter emoji to react to very real tragedies. ![]() The sort of thing that caused Carrie to go ballistic at her prom. This is the face your dad makes at the kids when he's proud of a groan-worthy pun.īut close an emoji's eyes in order to communicate laughter - as if he's laughing so hard he can't even see what you've written - and it feels aggressive. Often, it has to do with the subtleties of the design: Heck, it's only a slight shift away from my favorite emoticon of all time:ĪHe's gleeful. But make no mistake, Facebook's laughing face emoji is laughing at you, and it's doing so in a way far more infuriating than simply a written-out "ha ha" or "lol." Nobody likes being dismissed or disrespected. But the laughing face taps into a primal sort of rage. The meaning is obvious: Your argument is so foolish, so stupid, that I'm actually laughing. One commenter throws out an argument, and another, instead of giving an earnest response, slaps down a laughing-face reaction instead. Yet the laughing face has been pressed into service for a more sinister purpose: Derisive mockery of sincere statements.Īnyone who's waded into the ugly fray of Facebook arguments - just scroll down the Inlander Facebook page - has watched this happen. This is how I get my emotional validation as a person. It's that last one that turns my own face red-orange-angry.Īt first, adding a laughing face seemed a perfect fit for Facebook: I like to make jokes on Facebook. Back in 2016, recognizing that the range of human emotion extended beyond either "like" or "agnostic," Facebook went beyond the thumbs up, introducing a slew of new reaction options: the heart the face shedding a single tear the fuming, red-orange angry face the mouth-agape WOW face and, finally, a laughing face, eyes closed, mouth caught in mid guffaw. ![]()
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