(The Portuguese-language category below is data taken from Brazil, not Portugal.) In all the following bar charts, emoji are ranked by one emoji symbol’s percent of all emoji usage for that nation.

Tyler Schnoebelen has discovered something curious about why people use the skull emoji. Schnoebelen is a linguist and the chief analyst for Idibon, a firm that interprets linguistic data.

The warning proved prescient. The company’s data scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and ...