Read This: Emoji-oversight org is <sad face>, <surprised face>

The Unicode Consortium, a relatively obscure non-profit organization founded in 1991, has a dull-sounding but nevertheless vital mission: “To develop standards for translating alphabets into code that can be read across all computers and operating systems.” But there are some within the Consortium who are dismayed over the organization’s current all-consuming focus on emoji and its seeming abandonment of its original commitment to old, obscure, and foreign languages. All of this is detailed in an investigative piece for BuzzFeed by Charlie Warzel entitled “Inside ‘Emojigeddon’: The Fight Over The Future Of The Unicode Consortium.” According to Warzel, the rift within the non-profit manifested itself in some “acerbic” internal emails related to a positive mention of emoji on Late Show With Stephen Colbert. A frustrated scholar and Unicode contributor named Michael Everson voiced his discontent, Jan Brady style, in the email chain: “Emoji, emoji, emoji. It’s all about emoji.”