Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
MURRAY — Texting, messaging, Snapchat, Instagram — kids are growing up in a very social world filled with emojis.
A heart is a heart, and a smiley face is a smiley face.
But a filmstrip emoji can also be a request for nude photos. A movie camera is a stand in for racy, sexual video. And a computer isn’t always a computer. It can reference an inappropriate session on Skype. The emojis for fire, a peach and a tent can take on sexually explicit meanings.
Other emojis are used as threats. The combination of a guy chased down by scissors can be a way of saying, "I'm going to cut you." A skull next to an arrow pointing to fire is telling the receiver to “die in a fire."
The Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force says online predators are using emojis in their texts and chats with Utah children.
“Predators use everything kids use,” said ICAC education specialist Michelle Busch-Upwall. “If you want to stay on top of what your kids are doing, you need to be on top of it yourself. You need to understand what they are.”
Busch-Upwall encourages parents to look up the meanings of emojis their kids are using, especially since one symbol can reference many different things, let alone combinations of emojis.
“Absolutely, there’s different meanings for everything,” she said. “Say you see something on your child’s phone and you question what it is. Put it in a Google search, look and see. There are places that will tell you exactly the emoji translations.”
