Russia’s state media watchdog is investigating whether gay-themed emojis on Facebook are in violation of Russian laws against promoting homosexuality.

The probe initiated this week comes as the result of a complaint from Mikhail Marchenko, a senator in Russia’s upper house of parliament, who was the first official to note the potential danger in the cartoon smiley faces of boys kissing boys and girls kissing girls.

In his written appeal to The Federal Service For Supervision of Communication, Information Technology and Mass Media, which is known in Russia as Roskomnadzor, the senator from the region of Bryansk called for an investigation into whether the emojis violate Russia’s controversial 2013 law against “homosexual propaganda” among minors.

“These emojis of non-traditional sexual orientation are seen by all users of the social network, a large portion of whom are minors,” said Senator Marchenko. “But propaganda of homosexuality is banned under the laws and under the pillars of tradition that exist here in our country.”

In response to the senator’s complaint, the federal agency asked the main youth group of President Vladimir Putin’s political party, the Young Guard, to form an “expert opinion” on this matter of “high social significance,” according to the Izvestia daily, which obtained a copy of the agency’s response to the senator on Wednesday.

 In the response, which was written by the deputy head of Roskomnadzor, Maxim Ksenzov, the agency says it is prepared to “take reactive measures” against the emojis if they are found to constitute a threat to Russian children. Under Russian law, the agency is able to block Russians from accessing websites that are found promoting homosexuality among minors. It can also impose fines against those websites for failing to comply with the legislation.

Denis Davydov, the chairman of the coordinating council of Young Guard, which is the youth wing of Putin’s United Russia party, said that his organization would ask professional psychologists to determine “whether there is propaganda or no propaganda” in these emojis.

 In June, the Young Guard’s expert opinion on such matters aided a legal case against a Russian website called Children-404, an online resource in Russia that helps council local teenagers through the process of coming out. The head of that project, Elena Klimova, has faced numerous court appearances and fines for her work, with the most recent fine of 50,000 rubles (about $900) upheld by a Russian court this week.

Facebook’s series of emojis celebrating gay pride first appeared on the network in 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed a victory to the cause of marriage equality by overturning the Defense of Marriage Act. The social network has since updated its so-called “Pride” series of emojis, including after last month’s historic Supreme Court decision obliging all U.S. states to allow gay marriage.

Though the Russian probe into emojis will focus specifically on Facebook, users of Twitter and Apple’s new operating system for the iPhone are also able to include rainbow flags and other gay-themed icons in their posts and messages.

Davydov, the Young Guard chairman, said that these services could also become the target of investigations if Russian citizens begin to complain about them. “This is not our first day working with Roskomnadzor,” Davydov noted in an interview with a Moscow radio station. “We have on numerous occasions appealed at various levels against the spread of extremism online, the spread of child pornography and so on,” he said.

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Sorry, "lol," nobody is using you out loud anymore.

The new way to laugh online is "Hah aha" or through emojis, at least according to Facebook.

In response to a New Yorker article on "Hahaha vs. Hehehe," Facebook thought it would be fun to figure out how its users laugh online.

The winning laugh is the "Haha," but it can vary wildly by region. Florida really likes emojis, which may be good to know come election season.

To learn how we laugh, Facebook researchers analyzed posts and comments written in English during the last week May. They did not analyze direct messages, so we don't know people laugh or use emojis in private, according to the blog post.

Still, 15 percent of people who commented or posted during that week laughed in some way.

The clear winner was the "Haha" with 51 percent of uses. Emoji took second place with 33 percent and the "hehe" trailed behind at 13 percent.

Apparently what we post isn't amusing enough to inspire laughter out loud because only approximately 2 percent of posts used "lol" at all.

How we laugh also depends on gender and where we live. "Hahas" and "hehes" are slightly preferred by men whereas women are more likely to opt for an emoji.

Florida, though, dominated emojis and "lols" while the west coast preferred the "hehe" to the rest of the country. The darker the color on the map below, the more popular a laugh is compared to other states. 

Facebook has more of a breakdown here.

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A lot of thinking went into the design for the poop emoji.

On iPhones, iPads, and Macs, the "poop" emoji looks like this:

It's practically a cultural icon at this point.

But on Windows, it looks like this:

Note the lack of a smile. 

It turns out there's actually a really good reason for this, as shared on Twitter by Microsoft Edge browser engineer Jacob Rossi.

Google, Apple, and Microsoft all adhere to an industry standard called "Unicode," which sets the rules for how text is expressed on computing devices all over the world. Unicode also oversees the decision for what does and doesn't get to be an emoji. 

It's because of Unicode that you can see emoji no matter what device you're texting or messaging from. So long as it supports Unicode, you'll see an emoji.

But it's up to each individual company to decide what those emoji look like. Unicode says that "poop" is an official emoji, but it's up to the Apples and Microsofts of the world to decide what "poop" looks like in their slice of the world. 

Apple decided to implement it as the "lucky golden poo," a Japanese concept indicating good luck. But the official Unicode description calls for "a pile of feces" (seriously). 

This meant Microsoft had a decision to make. Do they make their poop happier, or adhere to the strict Unicode definition? 

According to this internal Microsoft bug tracker report shared by Rossi, they chose the latter, bringing it as close to the Unicode definition as it could (and trying to ignore its "unfortunate" resemblance to the ice cream soft serve emoji):

Here's the Microsoft soft-serve emoji, if you're curious. They chose chocolate because it showed better.

Interestingly, Google went with a version with vapors and flies, also bucking the Unicode definition for Android and Chrome OS:

Meanwhile, Twitter followed Apple's lead with a very happy poop emoji:

It just goes to show you the thinking and the arguments that go into every little thing you do in your digital life. It also explains why an iOS user's happy poop is an Android user's steaming pile of feces.

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This Emoji Mosaic generator makes it easy to turn any image into a piece of emoji art — so we emoji-fied the posters from 30 of our favorite movies.

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The middle finger emoji is finally making its way to an iPhone near you.

After years of being noticeably absent from Apple's keyboard, the hotly anticipated emoji has appeared in the developer version of iOS 9.1, a software update that will be released to the public sometime this fall.

The middle finger joins a host of other new emoji, like the burrito and taco, in the forthcoming update. We are getting blessed with these new emoji thanks to an update to the Unicode standard earlier this summer.

Praise be.

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Get ready for a bunch of new emoji on your iPhone.

In an upcoming software update, Apple is adding dozens of new emojis, including the middle finger and burrito.

The new emoji were first announced in June by the Unicode Consortium, a group that standardizes emoji between different companies like Apple and Microsoft.

They became available on Thursday to people who are testing out iOS 9, the next version of Apple's mobile operating system. 

Apple is also introducing some more skin tones for some emoji and a bunch of new flag emoji.

So you can get a peek at what to expect, we've collected most of the new emoji you'll find in iOS 9.1 when it becomes available to download this fall.

There are several new face emoji in iOS 9.1, like the hugging and nerd face.

Two new hand emoji include the middle finger the horn sign, also known to mean "rock on."

New animals include a unicorn and an adorable lion face.

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Bill Nye the Science Guy is back for round two of using emojis to explain scientific concepts. The first time, he covered evolution, complete with his own bow-tie-wearing emoji doppelganger.

This time, Nye joins Mashable's "The Watercooler" series to talk about how the Internet has grown from just a means of connecting academic institutions to a massive system linking practically everything around us.

Soon enough, everything from our watch to our furnace will one day soon (if it isn't already) be hooked up to the Internet, The Science Guy illustrates with corresponding emojis.

That includes jet engines on airplanes — not a particularly thrilling thought for those concerned with potential hacks that could bring an airplane to the ground. 

"The future is for those who can think differently about how everything is connected," Nye says before rather goofily exclaiming that those people will be the ones to change the world.

The video is part of GE's "Emoji Science" project, which combines DIY science projects and videos with lots and lots of emojis.

Check out the full video:

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Apple just launched its first major update for iOS 9, called iOS 9.1. The new software brings a few fixes and features to the iPhone, with the most prominent being the addition of more than 150 new emojis.

Here's a look at some of the new emojis:

Some of the most notable additions include the taco and burrito emojis:

And the middle finger emoji:

The new emojis are based on the Unicode 8 standard, which is a set of symbols and words that the tech industry uses to make sure emojis are consistent across different devices. We first learned about these new emojis when the developer version of iOS 9.1 launched in September, but now they're available for everyone. 

The update also makes it easier to take Live Photos if you own an iPhone 6S or iPhone 6S Plus. Now, when you snap Live Photos, your iPhone will be able to tell when raise or lower your iPhone so that those moments aren't captured in the Live Photo.

To update your iPhone to iOS 9.1, head over to Settings>General>Software Update. Then from there, you'll be prompted to agree to Apple's terms and conditions before proceeding with the update. It's best to connect to a Wi-Fi network when installing the update to avoid using a lot of data. 

Here's the full list of improvements you'll get with iOS 9.1:

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The US State Department released a new batch of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails Friday — including one in which she inquired about how to use emojis on her BlackBerry.

Senior Clinton adviser Philippe Reines emailed Clinton in April 2012 to apologize for running late. Clinton ignored the apology and instead offered a question: "On this new berry can I get smiley faces?"

Reines replied he didn't think it was possible over email, but that she could do so through text messaging.

"I THINK that if you type :) it mIGHT automatically convert it into a symbol. Try it," he wrote.

Here's that exchange:

That was only the latest in an apparently ongoing saga involving Clinton and BlackBerry emojis. Two months earlier, she told Reines and long-time aide Huma Abedin, now a top adviser on her presidential campaign, that she was "quite bereft that I've lost the emoticons from my latest new old berry."

"Is there anyway I can add them?" she asked.

Reines responded with a lengthy email he admitted was likely "a LOT more than you bargained for."

"So without having actually seen your latest new old berry, I'm guessing that the reason you like it is the familiarity of the device coupled with the familiar operating system. It's just like the old one," he wrote.

He added: "If not identical, awfully close. Problem is, one of the very few upsides of the new operating system is the incorporation of the emoticon chart with the texting feature. So you're in a bit of a Catch-22: to get back what you like you're going to have to revert to what you didn't like — meaning, the latest operating system."

Here's that exchange:

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Don't mess with Ariana Grande.

The 22-year-old singer was promoting her new single "Focus" on Power 106 this week when two radio DJs asked her a series of sexist questions.

"If you had to choose between your phone and makeup, which would you give up?" one DJ asked.

"Is this what you think girls have trouble choosing between?" she fired back. "Is this men assuming that that's what girls would have to choose between?"

And when Grande told the DJs her favorite new emoji was a unicorn, they proceeded to say it was a "girls" emoji.

"Many boys use the unicorn," Grande corrected. "You need a little brushing up about equality. Who says the unicorn emoji isn’t for men?"

Story by Aly Weisman and editing by Ben Nigh

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Everyone loves emoji!

Those little symbols have become part of our everyday vocabulary: Emoji provide easy, simple ways to express oneself, particularly on mobile devices where typing on a tiny screen isn’t always the easiest or most efficient way to communicate.

One company is trying to bring that same ease of expression to desktop computers, by way of a full QWERTY keyboard that doubles as an emoji keyboard.

The Emoji Keyboard, from Austin, Texas-based EmojiWorks, looks pretty easy to use. It works like a normal keyboard until you press one of the emoji keys, which will transform the next key you press into the appropriate emoji you see on that key.

EmojiWorks is selling three different types of these keyboards: An $80 Emoji Keyboard with 47 emoji, a $90 Emoji Keyboard Plus with 94 emoji, and the $100 Emoji Keyboard Pro with over 120 emoji.

The Emoji Keyboards are currently available for pre-order, but EmojiWorks says they won't ship until December 1 at the earliest. Manufacturing and the number of orders might affect the delivery timetable.

Unfortunately, Apple might not be happy about this new hardware: the Apple Color Emoji you see on these keyboards were paid for and designed by Apple — and they're not open-sourced for reuse. We’ve reached out to the company.

For now, though, you can still pre-order an Emoji Keyboard for yourself or a loved one. Because there’s no better way to say “I love you” than giving them a keyboard with dozens of cartoons on it.

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Email isn't dead — at least not yet.

While texting and the billion-dollar Slack app creep into email's territory, the 44-year-old technology is still very much evolving.

And that evolution, according to a new Adobe study, is overrun with emoji.

When researchers surveyed more than 400 US employees over the age of 18, a full third of millennial employees said they believed using emoji was appropriate when communicating by email with a direct supervisor or senior executive.

The days of the curtly worded email are quickly coming to an end.

In their place: a new dynamic in which superiors and underlings use everyday language (and symbols) to exchange ideas, schedule meetings, criticize mistakes, and heap on praise.

The trend seems to come from email's change in identity. It's closer to texting than letter-writing.

And since younger people have grown accustomed to certain forms of expression on their phones — aka a smiling coil of poop — their work computers see more of the same.

It may be tempting to say this behavior is ruining the quality of our conversations, but Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker isn't convinced.

As Pinker reminds us, the use of emoji in everyday conversation actually makes our speech more effective.

"What the smiley in particular does, mainly conveying irony or levity, is often crucially important in getting a message across, because irony is often undetected," he told Tech Insider.

Maybe you were genuinely appreciative when you typed out "The five-layer dip was great. I can't wait to try it again." But the lack of transmitted emphasis on great or can't wait may make you seem like an indifferent robot.

The same message enlivened with exclamation points and emoji — two flourishes straight out of the millennial email handbook — has no problem getting emotion across: "The five-layer dip was great!! I can't wait to try it again :)."

Not all bosses necessarily want to be pals with their staff. But more and more manager love emoji as much as their employees. 

Bring on the 🔥🔥🔥.

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 Emoticons are pretty important:

• Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker says they're an extremely useful linguistic evolution.
• The Oxford English Dictionary named "crying face" the word of the year.
• Humans collectively send 6 billion emoticons every day.

But they don't teach emoticons in school, and some of them are actually hard to understand — at least for some of us.

Below we've listed the actual definitions for all the main emoticons.

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Jakarta (AFP) - In the latest crackdown on gay rights in Indonesia, the government has demanded all instant messaging apps remove same-sex emoticons or face a ban in the Muslim-majority country.

The emojis — which are available on the popular apps LINE and Whatsapp as well as Facebook and Twitter — depict same-sex couples holding hands and the rainbow flag, commonly used to symbolise the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

"Such contents are not allowed in Indonesia based on our cultural law and the religious norms and the operators must respect that," Ismail Cawidu, spokesman for the Communication and Information Ministry, told AFP Friday. 

He said of particular concern was that the colourful emojis and stickers could appeal to children. 

"Those things might be considered normal in some Western countries, while in Indonesia it's practically impossible," he said.

Cawidu said the ministry had contacted all companies that used such content, including Twitter and Facebook, and failure to comply with the request to remove the emojis could lead to the apps being banned in Indonesia.

LINE Indonesia has already removed its gay emojis from online stores and issued an apology.

"LINE regrets the incidents of some stickers which are considered sensitive by many people," the messaging app said in a statement.

"We ask for your understanding because at the moment we are working on this issue to remove the stickers."

While homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia, the topic remains a controversial subject. 

In January, the University of Indonesia told a support group providing sex education and counselling for LGBT students that they did not have permission to hold meetings on campus.

And last year Aceh, the only province in Indonesia which implements sharia law, introduced caning as a punishment for gay sex. 

Prominent gay activist Hartoyo said the move to ban the emojis was symptomatic of a wider crackdown on LGBT rights.

"This is just the latest in a series of incidents that have happened recently," he said.

"The government has let this ignorance go on for far too long and it has put our nation in danger." 

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Have you ever gotten a text that didn't make sense? Maybe the embedded emojis were to blame. As more emojisappear on our phones, the emotions they convey becomes more specific and nuanced. Many of these emojis are being misused in texts because we misunderstand each's purpose. Here are 22 of these emojis and their real meanings.

Produced by Rob Ludacer. Original Reporting by Gus Lubin and Skye Gould.

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Facebook just rolled out a whole new way to react to posts. No longer limited to "liking" posts, now you can react with all sorts of emotions. 

Produced by Matt Stuart. Original Reporting by Alex Heath.

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Late last month, Facebook rolled out its new "emoji reactions" feature, which lets you respond to a post with a series of animated faces instead of just "liking" it.

And while those reactions are cute, an enterprising developer has found a way to make them better: swapping out Facebook's standard cartoon faces out for different Trump faces, or Pokemon, or whatever someone can think up next.

Here's how it works.

First you have to download the "Reaction Packs" browser extension for either Chrome or Firefox. Once that's done, you can swap out the default reactions for any of the custom packs that either the creators, or other developers, have uploaded. The extension launched with three: Trump, Pokemon, and Soot Sprites.

The Trump ones are particularly brilliant. However you feel about the Republican frontrunner, he does have truly incredible facial reactions. Just check out what his pack looks like:

And here is the Pokemon version:

And for reference, here are the standard Facebook offerings:

We should note that the customized emojis will basically transform all the emojis that you see in your own News Feed, but they will not appear as Trump or Pokemon in your friends’ feeds when you use an emoji to react to someone else's post (unless your friends have also downloaded the Reaction Packs). Still, it's a great way to add a touch of humor to your feed.

And if you want to see how to code your own custom packs, check out this post by François Grante, who seems to have kicked off the whole craze.

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In the next 100 years, thousands of languages will die out.

It's hard to know just how many languages we'll lose, but linguists estimate that between 50-90% of the more than 6,000 current world languages will cease to exist in the next century. That's a global hit of 3,000 to 5,400 languages.

This is known as language death, although linguists prefer the less alarmist "language loss."

Sometimes we lose a language because the community that speaks it is wiped out. But it's much more common that a community simply switches to another language.

As Lenore Grenoble, a linguist at the University of Chicago, told Tech Insider the reasons a community switches languages are complex, but urbanization is a big factor.

As more and more people move into cities, they give up their local language in favor of the more widely spoken languages of the city, often a lingua franca like English that serves as a bridge between cultures with different native languages.

But there is some form of salvation for thousands of doomed languages: The internet could slow their decline or at least help preserve that linguistic diversity.

"In order for languages to be alive, they need to be used and they need a place to use them," Grenoble says, "and that's what the internet buys us."

There really hasn't been a better time to speak your language and be heard than today. Unlike other media, such as television and radio, it costs very little to communicate over the internet. You don't need a studio and a big transmitter to reach an audience. All you need is a smartphone, an internet connection and a Twitter account and you can reach a global audience.

And unlike print media, writing on the internet doesn't have the same strict guidelines as traditional prose.

"It's less threatening and less rigid," Grenoble says. "Blogging and Twitter are somewhere between written and spoken speech."

Chances are, however, that internet use will not save the most at-risk languages in the world.

Take the more than 800 languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. While the nation boasts the greatest language diversity on the planet, most of its languages are spoken by less than 1,000 people, and it's unlikely that access to Twitter will do much to spread these highly specific dialects.

[h/t Popular Science]

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows how the world's first written languages spread

In November 2015, Oxford Dictionaries announced that their 2015 Word of the Year was the "face with tears of joy" emoji.

The internet collectively freaked out.

But emoji haters, who almost universally lament the characters as the pinnacle of illiteracy, are missing a key point: It hearkens back to the origins of written language.

And no, that doesn't mean emoji are "more primitive," as art critic Jonathan Jones argued in the Guardian last year (using an ethnocentric reading of history that's as unabashedly colonialist as it is outmoded).

When humans first began to use written communication in Mesopotamia around 3,200 BC, it was in images. And sure, it was pretty basic: A picture of a bull meant a bull. (It's possible that much older markings on tortoise shells found in China in 2003 are even earlier proto-writing, but that's still controversial.)

That kind of literal symbolism lasted for a few centuries — but, starting as early as 3,400 BC, cuneiform had spread to Egypt and began to get more abstract. Pictures started to stand in for sounds.

We still do this today in the form of rebus puzzles like this one:

Got it yet? Eye, bee, leaves. I believe.

This isn't the most common use of emoji — it would be in contradiction with their cross-cultural intent. The world imported them from Japan and were never intended to stand in for English or other sounds.

But cuneiform images also started to stand in concepts, like honor or life.

In the brainteaser (also called a rebus) above, "belief" is completely abstract — you can't draw it in a way that would be universally understood. A Japanese-speaking Buddhist's phonetic representation of belief, for example, would likely not be the same as that of an English-speaking Christian.

So in ancient times, rebuses transformed over time and distance, becoming less like direct representation and more like phonetic one. By 2,600 BC, this kind of usage was common. Roughly a century later, a small group adapted hieroglyphics into individual representations of sounds, creating the first alphabetic writing system: Phoenician.

The alphabet-like system, which lacked vowels, spread to Greece through trade, where it became a comprehensive alphabetic system.

So what does this have to do with emoji?

First, ancient languages were needed to be widely understood, even across language groups. While many emoji are culturally specific (particularly to Japan), those that signal emotional tone are pretty easy to understand across languages.

On a deeper level, the idea that words are also concepts is very much like our earlier, pictographic expressions. Abstract concepts can be quickly easily summed up in an icon: Love with a heart; strength with a curled bicep; key for life goals, thanks to DJ Khaled.

They occupy the awkward space between the conceptual and the literal and fill in for non-verbal cues, like facial expression and tone.

Ultimately, though, there's no mollifying the haters. As Steven Pinker writes in the introduction to "The Sense of Style," complaints about the ever-evolving peculiarities of language likely date all the way back ancient Sumeria, where this whole writing thing started in the first place.

And maybe that's the biggest thing emoji share with its early cuneiform predecessors: It's another, perhaps radical, shift in how society and language interact — and once again, it's going to freak people out.

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