😂 is the most used emoji in England, Wales, and Scotland. In Northern Ireland it's ♥️ yet this is also the most used in the UK. So either the data is wrong or Northern Ireland is pumping those numbers UP.
Reminder that "national boundaries with mercator projection" maps are, while on the surface interesting, on a meaningful enough level are less useful due to sheer degree of variance. Small (sized) countries get buried to thr point of not being visible, while large (populated) countries get over-generalised to the point of meaninglessness.
Presumably that's why the flags are so popular as well, I doubt Belgians are sending Belgian flags to one another in the DM's. Or maybe they do, I wouldn't know.
looks like (of course there are exceptions to these observations): those with a laughing face live in a media landscape mostly dominated by the people, those with praying hands, are places where mostly the theocracy have the phones, hearts mean the government has the mainhand in this and are trying to deflect of some shit, and finally, no fucking clue what the fuck japan is doing... but i dont want to go to antigua and barbuda, pray laos is allright and hope kuwait finds its place
a worked example: if england/scotland/wales all use heart ❤️ 49% and use tears of joy 😂 at 51%, and then northern ireland was to use heart ❤️at 100%, you can imagine this would tip the whole uk over
even more freaky, you could make all 4 constituent countries use heart ❤️ at 49%, make each constituent use a different unique emoji 👍😀🥰😼 at 51% each, and then the aggregate would show that heart ❤️ is still the most used across the UK
now consider for each place on this map, they are ranking more than just 2 emojis. the map itself says that tears of joy 😂 is only scoring 5% worldwide, and that's 1st place. with margins of 5% and under to be deemed winner, it's no wonder funky effects show up
Volume. They only use heart emojis in morse code to communicate all their messages in NI. Also the entire government website and all companies start and end their webpage with a mandatory 600-heart header/footer, for security.
A bunch of countries just have their own flag as an emoji... The author barely managed to identify which emoji tourists use when posting about their trip on twitter.
the data is clearly fucked given the whole UK mess, and given it's all either small countries, authoritarian hellholes or both which have their country flag I'm inclined to believe it's a "no data" placeholder
I don't think twitter users in authoritarian hellholes are acting like NPCs going "Glory to Artsotzka" every five minutes.
It's tourism, coupled with low twitter use from the local population. Belgium has a bigger population than Belarus and unlike it isn't an authoritarian hellhole. But it's way more touristy. So Belgium has its own flag as the most used emoji but Belarus doesn't.
You can see this pattern pretty clearly in the ME as well. Jordan, Yemen, or Syria don't have their own flag as their most used emoji (despite being both small and undemocratic), because there ain't any tourists there. Qatar does. (A bit surprised about Cyprus though, do they use twitter a lot?)
The data is probably sound, but the methodology is insane.