The Emoji Crisis: Why Surveillance and eDiscovery Solutions Matter

Emojis have become a universal language that transcends borders and cultures. These tiny, expressive icons convey emotions, thoughts, and complex messages. But have you ever wondered if emojis contain secrets that can harm your organization? Let’s uncover the dark truth of emojis and how you can avoid a significant crisis by regulating this style of communication across your data estate properly.

You may wonder, “Why should I be concerned with emojis?” The short answer is that regulators and federal judges care. You may have seen a couple of prominent lawsuits in the news where the use of emojis provided enough evidence to move forward with court proceedings. For example:

• Twitter, now known as X,  filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk, citing posts he made — including one of a single poop emoji — as evidence that he had disparaged the contracts that he had when he was buying the tech giant for $44 billion.
• A federal judge ruled that the emojis of a rocket ship, money bag, and upward chart objectively meant one thing, a financial return on investment, and sternly warned users of their implications.

So, it turns out emojis are a big deal. But let’s dig a little deeper before diving into the solutions needed to handle them across your electronic communication channels adequately.

What Do Regulators Think of Emojis?

About 3,700 official emojis use the current Unicode Standard. Originally intended to convey emotion, people now can construct entire conversations using emojis.

Regulators and federal court judges consider emojis are a form of communication. Thus, anything that governs the use of communication, whether for surveillance or legal purposes, must factor the impact of emojis into activities such as surveillance and eDiscovery. In short, you need to be able to search and review emojis contextually.

That means it’s essential to have robust system for managing emojis in electronic communication in place for compliance, litigation, or maintaining a record of critical conversations. Embracing surveillance and eDiscovery tools for emojis is not just a matter of staying up to date; it's a proactive step toward ensuring modern digital conversations' integrity, transparency, and security.

The Solution: Veritas

The Veritas Data Compliance and Governance portfolio provides options to help your eDiscovery and surveillance teams get to the ❤️ of the matter. Let’s explore four ways Veritas can help you detect and review the usage of emojis in your communications.

• Capture: When it comes to eDiscovery and surveillance, it’s essential that you can capture emojis so that you can search for them and review them. Veritas Alta™ Capture can capture emojis in a multitude of different mediums, whether email, chat over OneDrive, or SharePoint. Once captured, it indexes them, making them findable for you.
• Classify: The Veritas Alta Classification console can use policies to detect emojis and phrases. Beyond detecting their presence, the product also factors emojis into sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis uses Natural Language Processing to measure an item’s polarity. For example, is it positive or negative in nature? By factoring the sentiment score of each emoji along with any text, Veritas Alta Classification can calculate a much more accurate score.
• Review: Veritas Alta Surveillance can find items containing emojis identified by Veritas Alta Classification. You can filter and select tags created for policies that consider emoji or emoji phrase sentences. But you can also use Veritas Alta Surveillance to find emojis without leveraging classification. Search for them directly via department and application search: Simply paste any emoji into your search criteria or hotwords. When you run the search, it will find any item with the emoji you have selected.
• Discover: Quickly filter on classification policy using Veritas Alta eDiscovery to find emojis. You can also search for them in much the same way you do with Alta Surveillance: Pasting the emoji into your search criteria enables you to search for emojis through all your items — in seconds.

As digital interactions become increasingly expressive and complex, emojis have become a vital communication component across the data landscape. They convey emotions, intentions, and nuances that text alone often cannot capture. With the growth in emoji usage comes the need for organizations and individuals to recognize the importance of monitoring, archiving, and retrieving these characters in a legal and regulatory context. Veritas can help.

A robust system for managing emojis in electronic communication is essential for compliance, litigation, or maintaining a record of critical conversations. Embracing surveillance and eDiscovery tools for emojis is not just a matter of staying up-to-date. It's a proactive step toward ensuring modern digital conversations' integrity, transparency, and security.

Watch the video below for a quick overview of how Veritas solutions can capture, classify, review, and discover emojis across your data estate.