Robber Emoji

Submission 20,952

Part of a series on The Mandela Effect. [View Related Entries]

About

Robber Emoji and Hiker Emoji refer to non-existent emojis which a significant number of people have false memories of existing in the past. These false memories of these emojis existing are an example of the Mandela Effect.

Origin

On June 11th, 2020, Redditor^[1] Stranger_bings posted a thread titled "Robber Emoji" to /r/MandelaEffect subreddit. In the thread, Stranger_bings claimed that he had memories of an official robber emoji existing, with the emoji having a grey beanie, a beard and a black and white striped shirt. The post received over 490 upvotes in one week. In the comments, multiple users claimed that they too had memories of the emoji existing, despite such emoji never having been a part of the official Unicode emoji set. Additionally, Redditor^[2] Raphael0969 claimed that he had memories of a hiker emoji existing with multiple other users seconding this.

Spread

On June 15th, 2020, TikTok^[3] user ajleidig posted a clip in which he reviewed the Reddit thread and expressed disbelief that the emoji did not exist. The post went viral on the platform, gaining over 2.2 million views and 445,500 likes in three days (shown below).

Also on June 15th, Twitter^[4] user @W4kEUPC4LL tweeted about the emoji never having existed, with the tweet gaining over 20 retweets and 230 likes (shown below, left). Later on the same day, Twitter^[5] user @turingtestified posted a similar tweet which received over 30 retweets and 160 likes (shown below, right).

On June 16th, Twitter^[6] user @dinasimp posted a mockup of the robber emoji, writing "i swear this emoji existed." The tweet received over 14,500 retweets and 124,800 likes and sparked a viral debate on the platform (shown below).

Following @dinasimp's viral post, several online outlets posted about the Mandela Effect induced by the non-existent emojis, including articles by Distractify,^[7] BuzzFeed^[8] and other websites.