Emoticons vs. Emojis on Twitter: A Causal Inference Approach
This addresses the evolution of paralinguistic communication in social media for users and platforms, but is incremental in analyzing a specific substitution effect.
The study investigated whether the adoption of emojis causes users to use fewer emoticons on Twitter, finding that emoji adoption leads to a reduction in emoticon usage.
Online writing lacks the non-verbal cues present in face-to-face communication, which provide additional contextual information about the utterance, such as the speaker's intention or affective state. To fill this void, a number of orthographic features, such as emoticons, expressive lengthening, and non-standard punctuation, have become popular in social media services including Twitter and Instagram. Recently, emojis have been introduced to social media, and are increasingly popular. This raises the question of whether these predefined pictographic characters will come to replace earlier orthographic methods of paralinguistic communication. In this abstract, we attempt to shed light on this question, using a matching approach from causal inference to test whether the adoption of emojis causes individual users to employ fewer emoticons in their text on Twitter.