The World Wants Mangoes and Kangaroos: A Study of New Emoji Requests Based on Thirty Million Tweets

Yunhe Feng, Wenjun Zhou, Zheng Lu, Zhibo Wang, Qing Cao

Abstract: As emojis become prevalent in personal communications, people are always looking for new, interesting emojis to express emotions, show attitudes, or simply visualize texts. In this study, we collected more than thirty million tweets mentioning the word “emoji” in a one-year period to study emoji requests on Twitter. First, we filtered out bot-generated tweets and extracted emoji requests from the raw tweets using a comprehensive list of linguistic patterns. Then, we examined patterns of new emoji requests by exploring their time, locations, and context. Finally, we summarized users' advocacy behaviors and identified expressions of equity, diversity, and fairness issues due to unreleased but expected emojis, and concluded the significance of new emojis on society. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to conduct a systematic, large-scale study on new emoji requests.