Emoticons vs. Emojis on Twitter: A Causal Inference Approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether the adoption of emojis on Twitter causes users to reduce their use of emoticons, using causal inference methods to analyze the relationship between these two forms of online expression.

Contribution

It applies a matching causal inference approach to determine the causal effect of emoji adoption on emoticon usage in social media texts.

Findings

Emojis causally reduce emoticon usage among Twitter users

The shift from emoticons to emojis reflects a change in online paralinguistic communication

The study provides evidence for the replacement of orthographic cues by pictographic emojis

Abstract

Online writing lacks the non-verbal cues present in face-to-face communication, which provide additional contextual information about the utterance, such as the speaker's intention or affective state. To fill this void, a number of orthographic features, such as emoticons, expressive lengthening, and non-standard punctuation, have become popular in social media services including Twitter and Instagram. Recently, emojis have been introduced to social media, and are increasingly popular. This raises the question of whether these predefined pictographic characters will come to replace earlier orthographic methods of paralinguistic communication. In this abstract, we attempt to shed light on this question, using a matching approach from causal inference to test whether the adoption of emojis causes individual users to employ fewer emoticons in their text on Twitter.