That smiley face emoji doesn’t mean what you think it does in China

WeChat’s big study reveals different emoji use by age

Reading Time:2 minutes

We made these extra large to be extra creepy.

Published: 8:24pm, 10 Jan 2019Updated: 8:50am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Sending an ordinary smiley face like 🙂 to your WeChat friend in China seems simple enough… but your friend might give you a strange look for it. (Perhaps a real-life version of 🤔.)

Turns out that the country’s most popular social app has its own etiquette for using emoji.

WeChat, the app that does everything

Consider 👋. It looks a little different in WeChat's version but at least it's not a biscuit. For many of us, this would simply mean that we’re happily waving goodbye. In WeChat, it could mean that you just said something really dumb and the sender doesn’t want to speak to you. Ouch!

And as for the regular smiley face? That’s not for friends. That’s usually reserved for your boss.

The WeChat Annual Data Report 2018 shows that emoji use doesn’t differ purely by geography, but also by the generation that uses them. The report -- full of interesting numbers on the only Chinese app with 1 billion users -- analyzed which groups of users prefer which emoji, along with their daily habits (leaving some users wondering who stole their chat records).

For instance, those born after the year 2000 preferred to use the facepalm emoji 🤦‍♀️. According to the report, this generation gets little sleep: They go to bed late and get up early, kind of what we would expect from overburdened Chinese school kids.