Emojis can ruin your life and make you a criminal 🔫 🔪 💣

Millennials love using emoji, so the smiley faces and symbols must be childish and silly, right? Nah, there is nothing wrong with these young folks or their fancy emoji -- each generation likes to have its own identity. Smartphones, emoji, and apps like Snapchat are totally cool and arguably uniquely theirs.

But what if I told you that emoji could 100 percent ruin your life and cause all sorts of problems? What if I told you that using certain emoji will turn you into a drug addict or even worse, a hipster? Well, don't believe any of that because it isn't true. What is a true story, however, is that emoji is becoming a contributing factor when some people are accused of crimes. Holy cow! One person is only 12 years old and being charged with what is essentially a terrorist act. Is the charge valid, or ridiculous?

Well, before we determine if the charge is dumb, lets talk about what an emoji is. It is simply a visual representation of something else. In other words, an emoji of a car, is the exact same thing as writing the word "car". Written language is not only letters -- pictures and symbols are legit characters too.

With all of that said, if you threaten a school by saying you will bring a gun, knife or bomb to it -- whether with alpha letters, emoji, or a mixture of the two -- it is a threat. The use of emoji is inconsequential to the seriousness of the threat.

According to the Washington Post, the 12 year old in question allegedly posted the following on Instagram.

Killing

“meet me in the library Tuesday”

The fact that this young person chose to use emoji in their message should not be a factor. True, some symbols could be open to interpretation without context, but a gun, bomb and knife when combined with the words "killing" and "meet me in the library Tuesday" seems rather open-and-shut to me. The charge is valid; the child really messed up here, as this could follow them for the rest of their lives.

So, do I think the 12 year old kid is an evil person or terrorist? No. Quite frankly, there is a good chance that the child thought using emoji made the communication less serious. Since emoji is so new, and the accused is so young, there should probably be some leniency. With that said, as the use of emoji becomes more mainstream, common sense will have to be expected.

This criminal case is not the first to include emoji, and it certainly won't be the last. The big takeaway here is that parents need to educate their children on the dangers of using emoji as threats or in other messages -- the symbols are not a joke or fad, but an extension of our language that appears to be here to stay.

Do parents and schools need to teach children that using emoji are just as serious as words? Tell me in the comments.

Photo credit: Rido / Shutterstock