This selection process lacks democratic accountability and is ripe for reform. The Consortium, specifically the dozen or so members of the Emoji Subcommittee, selects which emoji will make their debut in any given year. The Unicode Consortium is the body responsible for developing Unicode, the character encoding system that ensures that any text sent from an Android contains the same words when received by an iPhone. Decisions over whose identities find representation in this global language are overtly political, but these decisions are made according to standards that Western Liberal Democracies would never tolerate in other political matters. For that matter, you won’t find an emoji flag for Kurdistan or Tibet. However, despite proposals by LGBTQ+ activists in the years since, there is still no Trans Pride flag emoji.
The second was the Rainbow Pride Flag emoji: 🏳️🌈, which rapidly joined its geographic peers on phone keyboards everywhere.
In June 2016, an armed shooter opened fire in a gay nightclub in Florida, bringing international prominence to two words.
