Isiah Craig Fitzgerald, 18, was killed after a war of words on Facebook precipitated by Fitzgerald reacting with a laughter emoji on the profile photo of Tanner Watkins and his girlfriend.

Preply found that the association between death and laughing has been growing in general, not just in emoji use, since the ’40s (they used Google’s Books Ngram Viewer to find these numbers).

The emoji in question has become a lightning rod of generational tension, its meaning apparently having evolved. What once universally represented "I'm laughing so hard I'm crying," is now ...

If you’re still using the ‘laughing’ emoji, you might just be giving away your age. Once the universal symbol for laughter, it’s now seen as outdated by Gen Z, who prefer a dark, more ...