Crossed-Out Pride Flag Emoji Combination

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About

Crossed-Out Pride Flag Emoji Combination 🏳️‍🌈⃠ , also known as "No Homo" Emoji, refers to a Unicode symbol combination which appears as a crossed-out pride flag on iphone and ipad mobile devices when emojis "Pride Flag" 🏳️‍🌈 and "Prohibited" 🚫 are combined. The discovery of the emoji combination and its consecutive spread online sparked an outrage, with some users misinterpreting it as a new emoji.

Origin

The earliest available tweet containing 🏳️‍🌈⃠ combination was made by Twitter^[1] user @mioog on February 18th, 2019 (shown below, top left), who later claimed discovering it "in Apple's code"^[2]. The tweet gained 118 retweets and 336 likes in two days. In the following hours, multiple users used the combination in their tweets (examples shown below).

Some users misinterpreted the combination of the Unicode symbols as a new emoji added by Apple, describing it as homophobic and anti-LGBTQ^[3]^[4]^[5].

While the emoji combination appears as a crossed-out rainbow flag on Apple mobile devices (shown below, left), it appears differently on Android devices (shown below, center) and on Windows systems (shown below, right).

Combination Technique

On February 19th, 2019, Redditor^[6] goodbagels provided instructions for combining Unicode characters together (shown below). The effect can be replicated by putting any of the following Unicode characters, categorized as "combining" symbols, between the emojis: U+20DD, U+20E3, U+20E4, U+20DF.

Spread

On Twitter, the emoji combination has been used in multiple popular posts both of pro-LGBTQ and anti-LGBTQ nature (examples below).

On February 19th, 2019, Redditor^[7] Minchworm posted the Unicode combination to /r/copypasta subreddit. The post gained over 3,700 upvotes in one day.

On Instagram, the trend became the subject of memes and was used as comment spam (examples below).

The trend was covered by several news outlets, including Independent^[8], PinkNews^[9], Heavy^[10] and Paper^[11].