Over the years emojis have become a fundamental and natural part in online based communication. Due to this emojis have also entered the judicial system by appearing in several court cases, used as evidence for or against intent to commit crime. This essay studies relevant cases presented in Swedish trials to better understand how emojis are interpreted and processed within Swedish law. Additional interviews help to further examine possible approaches for a more trustworthy emoji-interpretation by the judicial system. The essays main findings further indicate that emojis are complex when used as evidence. This due to their ambiguity as well as not yet being an established part in court cases - furthermore complicating the judicial process of decoding these symbols. In addition, the essay finds that emojis' meanings are largely tied to culture and are also often platform-based. In order to avoid misunderstandings and wrongful decoding from litigators, this essays results proposes two main solutions: (1) organizations such as Unicode, as well as different platforms, should have a greater responsibility when technically standardizing emojis, to reduce misunderstandings. (2) Courts should at a higher rate introduce experts, such as linguists or emoji-experts, to ensure that emojis are decoded in a proper way.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-468988 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Krause, Roxanna, Stenberg, Olivia |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informatik och media |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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