Elon Musk’s X Quietly Removes Bitcoin, MAGA Emojis From Hashtags
Logos for several tokens started to first appear on X, previously Twitter, in 2020, as a step to improve brand adoption and recall on the internet.
Jul 26, 2024 at 10:54 a.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/MX6MQZ75ARDWFPG6WVEUJC77YU)
- Bitcoin and crypto hashtags on X no longer display emojis automatically.
- X did not publicly announce the removal, and the reason behind the apparent change is unclear.
Automatically generated emojis no longer accompany bitcoin and crypto hashtags on the Elon Musk-owned social application X, which houses some of the largest active cryptocurrency communities.
X's social media accounts or press pages did not publicly announce the removal as of European morning hours on Friday.
Crypto users on X started to comment early Friday that they could no longer see emojis when posting “#bitcoin” on the service. Some later found out that hashtags for #bnbchain and #cryptocom, which also showed emojis, no longer display the brand images.
As of Friday's European hours, an emoji for #MAGA that previously featured Republican candidate Donald Trump was also removed ahead of his scheduled appearance at the ongoing Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville.
The Bitcoin emojis were first introduced in 2020 when Jack Dorsey owned X, then known as Twitter. Dorsey tried to popularize the bitcoin symbol to Unicode, a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized.
X, as Twitter at the time, reportedly charged companies up to $1 million to add a branded emoji or symbol after a designated hashtag to help differentiate their branding from that of their competitors and create a buzz amongst consumers.
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Shaurya is the Deputy Managing Editor for the Data & Tokens team, focusing on decentralized finance, markets, on-chain data, and governance across all major and minor blockchains.