X replaced the water pistol emoji with a regular gun, for some reason

Image: The Verge

Years after Twitter replaced the pistol emoji with a green-and-orange water gun, X has decided to change it back to a regular handgun. An X employee announced the change in a post last week.

The company hasn’t explained the change, but it feels on-brand for Elon Musk’s social network. Twitter originally switched its emoji to display a water gun in 2018, following others like Google and Facebook. (Apple made the switch in 2016; Microsoft was a brief hold-out.)

We’ve embedded a screenshot of the X post, so you can see the gun image. (On some devices, the actual post still shows a water gun when embedded.)

Eventually, the Unicode Consortium, which decides which emoji get made in the first place, followed the...

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