Courts use emojis as evidence

They began as punctuation marks resembling smiling faces in internet chatrooms and text messages, and have evolved into masses of different pictograms for the age of social media.

Now courts in China are accepting emojis as legal evidence that signifies guilt or liability, even though their meaning may not always be directly obvious.

In one example, in a rental dispute a commercial tenant did not explicitly agree to a rent hike or indicate plans to vacate the factory, but sent the landlord an emoji of a smiling sun.

Frustrated, the landlord took the case to a court in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, arguing that the emoji was proof that the tenant had agreed to the rent rise. The court ruled in his favour.

In another case, a plaintiff successfully brought a civil case after he received several ‘‘bomb’’ emojis from a contact. He told the court he felt personally threatened by them. The case resulted in an out-of-court settlement, according to the high court for the eastern province of Jiangsu which has surveyed the use of emojis in litigation. It found more than 150 cases since 2018 where emojis had been used as legal evidence across China.

The Jiangsu court admitted the challenge of decoding emojis’ meaning, because they can be read subjectively, and noted that there was no national standard for interpreting them. Criminals were using emojis to mask their illegal activities, the court added. Drug dealers had used ‘‘sweets’’ and ‘‘wineglass’’ emojis as placeholders, and a sex worker used smiley faces to report her number of customers, the court said. The ambiguity of emojis has resulted in contrasting verdicts.

A court in the southern city of Guangzhou ruled that the ‘‘OK’’ emoji – a hand with index finger and thumb held together – did not amount to a legal commitment. However, a court in the southeastern city of Xiamen accepted the same emoji as evidence of admission in a loan dispute.