X Emojis: What Changed After Twitter, and What Still Works

The emoji X gave away

In November 2014, Twitter released its emoji artwork as an open-source project called Twemoji, with the images under a Creative Commons attribution licence so anyone could use them in their own products. It was a genuinely unusual move. Apple, Google and Microsoft all treat their emoji artwork as proprietary, which is why you cannot legally lift 😂 out of iOS and put it in your app.

Twemoji became the default emoji of the open web almost by accident. If you have seen the same flat, friendly emoji on a dozen unrelated sites, you have been looking at it. WordPress core still uses it as a fallback for browsers with patchy emoji support, which quietly put Twemoji on a large share of the web. Discord adopted it too. So did countless smaller projects that needed emoji and could not afford a designer, helped by a licence that asked for attribution and little else.

Then Twitter was acquired in October 2022, roughly 80 percent of staff left or were cut, and the people who maintained Twemoji were among them. According to Emojipedia’s timeline of the project, the last major Unicode-synchronised release from the original line was Twemoji 15.0 in June 2023. Nothing official has followed.

Two renderings of the same post

Here is the part that trips people up. X did not simply switch away from Twemoji. It switched on some surfaces and not others.

In February 2023, Twemoji stopped being used on mobile, and phones began showing their own native emoji instead. On x.com in a desktop browser, Twemoji still renders, and Emojipedia still catalogues the set as X’s. So a post containing 🫠 genuinely looks like two different things depending on where you read it, and neither reader has any indication the other is seeing something else.

Twemoji vs what you are actually seeing

Left is Twemoji, the set X still serves on x.com in a desktop browser. Right is the same character drawn by your own device right now. If the two columns differ, you have just seen the split.

Character	Twemojix.com desktop	Yoursyour device
U+1F62D		😭
U+1F525		🔥
U+1F480		💀
U+1FAE0		🫠
U+1F979		🥹
U+1F602		😂

On a phone the right column is what X shows you. On a desktop browser at x.com, the left column is. Same post, same characters, two different pictures.

This matters more than it sounds. If you are picking an emoji for a post that has to land a specific way, you are picking it blind: you can control the character, but not the drawing. The gap is widest on newer emoji, where vendor interpretations have not converged yet.

Who kept Twemoji alive

The project did not die, because open source does not really allow that. Since October 2022 it has been maintained in a fork run by Justine De Caires, a former Twitter designer who worked on the original, with contributors from Discord and WordPress.

The fork has kept pace with Unicode. It now tracks Emoji 17.0, while the version X inherited stopped at 15.0. In other words the abandoned project is two full Unicode releases ahead of the company that created it, and the newest emoji render correctly in the community version and not in the official one.

Downstream projects followed the fork rather than the original. The community releases are where the current artwork ships, and the projects that depend on Twemoji now pull from there.

There is a nice irony in the licensing. Because Twitter released the artwork under an open licence in 2014, X cannot un-release it. The decision that looked like generosity a decade ago is the reason the set survived its owner losing interest. For how emoji get standardised in the first place, and why vendors draw them differently, our piece on how an emoji becomes an emoji covers the process.

Hashflags, the emoji you had to pay for

Twitter also ran a second, stranger emoji system. Starting with the 2014 World Cup, certain hashtags would sprout a small custom image beside them. These were called hashflags, and they were not part of Unicode, not on your keyboard, and not permanent.

They became an advertising product. TechCrunch covered the first branded hashflag in September 2015, a Coca-Cola campaign, and after that they showed up around product launches and the Super Bowl. X has never published a rate card, and figures that circulate in marketing writeups are not something I can verify, so treat any specific price you read with suspicion.

The interesting part is what happens at the end. A hashflag lives only for its campaign window. When the window closes the image is withdrawn, and every post that used it reverts to a plain hashtag. Millions of posts quietly lost a picture they were written around, which is a decent argument against building your message on top of something a company can switch off.

What actually works on X now

With the private-set question settled (there is not one, beyond hashflags), the practical question is which ordinary emoji carry weight on the platform. Meltwater’s 2025 analysis puts 😭 on top of X with a 25.4% share of voice, and 🔥 unusually close behind at 22%.

That gap is the story. On most platforms the top emoji wins comfortably. On X the top two are nearly level, which fits a place built around argument and reaction rather than photos. 😭 does the heavy lifting for anything overwhelming, funny or unbearable, and 🔥 handles approval of a take. Neither is being used literally.

Worth knowing: 😭 on X is rarely sadness. It reads the way 💀 does on TikTok, as laughter pushed to breaking point. The loudly crying face page goes deeper on how that inversion happened. For the cross-platform ranking picture, the most popular emojis of 2026 has the full table, and this post will not repeat it.

When people stopped saying Twitter

The rebrand to X happened in July 2023. The language did not follow for about another two years, and search data shows almost exactly when it did.

Searches for "twitter emojis" fall from a peak of 82 to 22 on Google’s relative scale. "x emojis" climbs from around 30 to a peak of 63. They cross in the second quarter of 2024, when both sat at 33. That is roughly a year after the name changed, and the gap has widened every quarter since.

The third line is the one I did not expect. Searches for "twemoji" have roughly tripled since 2023, rising fastest in the period after X stopped maintaining it. Interest in the emoji set grew as its owner lost interest in it, which is either a good argument for open licensing or a slightly sad one about brand stewardship, depending on your mood.

If you still say Twitter, nothing here requires you to stop. The 🐦 is gone from the app icon, replaced by ✖️, and the set it used to ship still renders on desktop while your phone quietly substitutes its own. That is the honest state of emoji on X: the characters are standard, the pictures depend on where you are standing, and the most interesting thing the platform ever did with emoji was give them away.