Google has made several changes to its gun emoji over the years, starting with a black handgun in 2012, a vintage pistol in 2013, then revolvers in 2014 and 2017, and now, a water gun.

Y ears 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.

Twitter has now followed Apple’s lead in changing its pistol emoji to a harmless, bright green water gun. ... But Apple and Samsung perhaps hold more weight when it comes to where things are headed.

Microsoft is changing its toy gun emoji to a revolver — the exact opposite of Apple By Matt Weinberger 2016-08-05T16:37:23Z ...

Twitter has announced a number of changes in its Twemoji 2.5 update. Perhaps, most significantly, following the lead of several companies including Apple, WhatsApp, and Samsung, the pistol will ...

Earlier this week, Apple made waves with the revelation that in iOS 10, the forthcoming operating system update for iPhones and iPads, the existing revolver emoji would be replaced with a water ...

Apple has historically been a bit conservative about the more violent emoji—for quite a while, the gun, knife, and a few others were excluded from the macOS emoji picker even though the OS could ...

In 2016, Apple changed its depiction of the gun emoji to a toy water pistol. The company had, it seemed, chosen to abandon the revolver in response to the ongoing epidemic of American gun violence ...

Elon Musk ditched the water gun for a pistol emoji on X. It’s a worrying shot in the culture wars The updated design might seem insignificant, but depicting real guns has real-world ramifications.

Originally, every firm showed the emoji as a firearm, except Microsoft, which designed it as a Buck Rogers-style ray gun. In 2016, however, Apple changed it from a firearm to a water pistol.