You don’t have to be a real person to be the target of cancel culture. Last example, a Facebook emoji is accused by the left of being a devastating weapon in the service of the populist right.
Forget Pepe the Polecat, Harry Potter, Asterix and Christopher Columbus. We found the last victim of the cancel culture, certainly the very last of the year. We had to go very far, in New Zealand, on the site the spinoff. Its contributor, George Driver, explains how the Facebook emoji “haha” and its cousin “tears of joy” have a bad background, and that it is high time to remove them.
From populism – to tears
Initially on Facebook, we could go fishing for likes (symbolized by a blue thumb) by posting photos in swimsuits or witticisms (depending on the area in which we felt most comfortable). Then Mark Zuckerberg made it a little more complex by adding small nuances with the symbols “I love” (a red heart) and the haha, little yellow head laughing and a bit sarcastic. All this may seem very futile to the common people kept away from social networks, but in the eyes of our New Zealand contributor, this little symbol allows to signal his sneer and his contempt online, especially when it is put on a favorable article. at #MeToo or on another denouncing global warming. Driver even makes the link between the designation of the tears of joy (a small laughing symbol too, but to tears) by the Oxford English Dictionary as the word of the year in 2015, and the triumph, a year later, of the “post-truth”. Basically, these emoji, “weapons of the right in culture wars”, would have enabled the electoral victories of Brexit and Trump.
A devilish laugh
As we read further, we discover that in reality, this small symbol is the object of an already ancient demonization among certain fine Anglo-Saxon minds. In 2016, Abi Wilkinson, in The Guardian, called him “Obnoxious and giggling little yellow asshole” and seemed to have nightmares of it at night: “When I look at his yellow face, I see the hateful and carefree smirks of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson happily dancing through the present chaos – leaping, jumping and leaping over the cracks in the society they helped dig. and to expand, in complete safety, knowing that they will come out of it personally, no matter what ”. Driver also quotes a Bangladeshi cleric who issued a fatwa about the emoji, telling his 3 million followers that “If your reaction was to mock or ridicule people who have posted or made comments on social networks, it is totally forbidden in Islam”. The contributor of the spinoff must be very happy to have found an ally in another civilization: if the emoji attracts the anger of so many weirdos, it is because it certainly deserves to be abolished.
To read also, by Frédéric Magellan: “The Eternals”: Marvel film for virtuous millennials
In France, a country where sneering is still part of the common ground shared by the right and the left, the fight against the emoji haha has so far gone unnoticed. Of course, we can with Alain finkielkraut, worry about the barbaric laughter practiced on France Inter; but it’s still reassuring to think that tomorrow morning, when we wake up, Charline Vanhoenacker will still laugh loudly because Guillaume Meurice went to capture the right-handed slippage of a butcher-boy in Rungis at five in the morning – and this , perhaps, until the consumption of centuries.
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