Due to their pictographic nature, emojis come with baked-in, grounded semantics. Although this makes emojis promising candidates for new forms of more accessible communication, it is still unknown to what degree humans agree on the inherent meaning of emojis when encountering them outside of concrete textual contexts. To bridge this gap, we collected a crowdsourced dataset (made publicly available) of one-word descriptions for 1,289 emojis presented to participants with no surrounding text. The emojis and their interpretations were then examined for ambiguity. We find that, with 30 annotations per emoji, 16 emojis (1.2%) are completely unambiguous, whereas 55 emojis (4.3%) are so ambiguous that the variation in their descriptions is as high as that in randomly chosen descriptions. Most emojis lie between these two extremes. Furthermore, investigating the ambiguity of different types of emojis, we find that emojis representing symbols from established, yet not cross-culturally familiar code books (e.g., zodiac signs, Chinese characters) are most ambiguous. We conclude by discussing design implications.

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The design of online platforms is both critically important and challenging, as any changes may lead to unintended consequences, and it can be hard to predict how users will react. Here we conduct a case study of a particularly important real-world platform design change: Twitter's decision to double the character limit from 140 to 280 characters to soothe users' need to "cram" or "squeeze" their tweets, informed by modeling of historical user behavior. In our analysis, we contrast Twitter's anticipated pre-intervention predictions about user behavior with actual post-intervention user behavior: Did the platform design change lead to the intended user behavior shifts, or did a gap between anticipated and actual behavior emerge? Did different user groups react differently? We find that even though users do not "cram" as much under 280 characters as they used to under 140 characters, emergent "cramming" at the new limit seems to not have been taken into account when designing the platform change. Furthermore, investigating textual features, we find that, although post-intervention "crammed" tweets are longer, their syntactic and semantic characteristics remain similar and indicative of "squeezing". Applying the same approach as Twitter policy-makers, we create updated counterfactual estimates and find that the character limit would need to be increased further to reduce cramming that re-emerged at the new limit. We contribute to the rich literature studying online user behavior with an empirical study that reveals a dynamic interaction between platform design and user behavior, with immediate policy and practical implications for the design of socio-technical systems.