Someone click that modified “fake US” flag and pop it in a Unicode inspector to see if it produces a US or UK country code. Don’t have Twitter and can’t be arsed to make an account. Really curious if that part of the GUI actually types a genuine US flag or if they just re-iconed the UK flag.
It brings me back to my wee lad years when I went to an academy to “learn computers”, we had to draw the flow diagrams and write the code on paper, with a review by the teacher, before being allowed to type it into a computer and hit [RUN]… while the teacher humble bragged about how they used to cheat in college.
I haven’t used Twitter or X, but based on the image, that’s the keyboard. See the blue GIF icon? Likely X’s picker. The dark gray one below it is probably the keyboard. Could be Samsung because I see the same thing in Samsung Keyboard, SwiftKey, and Gboard.
twitter doesn’t have an emoji picker, and if it did, it would use the same iconography as the rest of the app, and, more importantly, the same emoji (except on iOS devices where they are forced to use apple’s emojis)
Yeah it looks like the Union flag is next to Gabon on the android emoji flag picker. I think the country code is GB so it’s next to GA even though the name is United Kingdom. That might be what’s throwing people.
The two US flag emojis are actually different Unicode emojis.
The first is 🇺🇲 ‘U+1F1FA U+1F1F2’ and is for ‘U.S. Outlying Islands’.
The second is 🇺🇸 ‘U+1F1FA U+1F1F8’ and is for ‘United States’.
No malice, no bad code, no bugs or typos, this is just expected behaviour.
The United Kingdom is the nation state, Great Britain is the combined land mass of Britain and the island of Ireland, England is one of the 4 home nations.
Great Britain does not include Northern Ireland. This raises the question, “what is the difference between Great Britain and Britain?”
The distinction, when it is made, is that Great Britain is the entity encompassing the three nations on the island of Britain. Sometimes the distinction is not made, and in that case Great Britain is used for both.
This is why I am always annoyed that England, Wales,and Scotland get to represent separately in international competitions. They’re essentially states, and you don’t see Texas turning up to the football world cup or something.
Britain/Great Britain are the name(s) of the island itself. The largest of the cluster of islands there off the coast of France and The Netherlands.
The “countries” of England, Scotland and Wales are located on the island of Great Britain (and several of the smaller nearby islands). These are distinct political regions with their own governments.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the “nation” made up of the three countries of Britain plus Northern Ireland, one of two “countries” located on the island of Ireland. The United Kingdom is the highest governmental body before you hit the international community; the UK has a desk at the United Nations, for example. It’s a “nation of countries” that is bound and fucking determined it’s not a federation despite being built a lot like one.
England doesn’t have its own government and parliament, it’s run directly by Westminster which also runs the UK. Part of the issue with the UK is that they never bothered to introduce a properly federal system, Westminster rules supreme gracing regions with some power to self-administer to lower their discontent but they can also take it away at any time.
Which then also led Britons to have inane takes such as the UK not being sovereign while being in the EU. They simply don’t get (con)federations.
The issue with England in particular is that they don’t seem to be discontent (enough) to demand Westminster devolve some powers, seeing that the country is governed by London for the benefit of London the rest being periphery. See all those English towns suddenly realising that all the money they got to develop were EU structural funds, not Westminster, and then still sticking with Brexit because I suppose realising your mistake is more embarrassing than tripling down. In their mind.
And Northern Ireland doesn’t have its own government (usually) because they can’t agree to form one because reasons.
Britain is the island with England, Scotland and Wales on it
Great Britain then also includes the entirety of Ireland, “standard” and Northern.
The UK is governmental grouping of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as they share the same parliament. To a certain extent each country has their own government too (except for England as it just uses the UK’s government in London). An example of how they are their own countries and not just States of the one country would be like how the EU is, except if Belgium also used the main EU parliament also as their own.
Edit: most of this is wrong, I think specifically the Ireland stuff, my bad.
Great Britain is a geographical term not a political one. It’s like saying continental United States, it doesn’t mean the same thing as the United States of America. The term covers the island of the United Kingdom plus a few but not all of the islands. The Isle of Wight is included the Shetland Islands are not.
The United Kingdom is made up of three countries England, Scotland, and Wales, plus all of the islands that are not covered by the term Great Britain, the United Kingdom is a country as well. It’s a country of countries. I don’t believe there is anywhere else in the world with that setup so it is confusing.
Northern Ireland is not part of the United Kingdom for all sorts of complicated reasons but it more or less boils down to the fact that it was a colony rather than the core of the empire. And it’s never been updated because what’s the point.
So the full and recognised international term is the United Kingdom of Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales, and all the small islands) and Northern Ireland. Except not the Isle of Man because that’s its own independent country that’s nothing to do with us but in some ways kind of acts like it’s part of the UK, they use the pound but they use it in the same way that Canada uses the dollar, but politically it is its own thing. Although I don’t believe there are any border checks so you can kind of pretend that it is part of the UK as you can just go there more or less whenever, it’s just a weird part of the UK where everyone’s strange and unhelpful.
That’s not quite right. Great Britain is the “big island” and the political grouping of England, Wales and Scotland (plus islands). “little Britain” has been used historically to name the island that Ireland/Norther Ireland is on, but that would be pretty controversial now…
The United Kingdom is the three countries of Great Britain, combined with Northern Ireland. And it’s the “official” country / nation, has a seat of the UN security council etc. But NI, Wales and Scotland are all countries, and in many peoples they’re nations too (depending on how you define such things).
Go away and fuck off with that terminology including all of Ireland, lived here my whole life and I’ve never heard that mentioned once. I’ve heard other ignorant geographical statements like the “British isles” but never once have I heard the shite you decided to put out.
Sorry, I’m open for correction, didn’t mean any harm. I genuinely thought what I said was right at the time of writing (only just woke up). I now realise it’s wrong but now I don’t know what is definitely right.
Great Britain then also includes the entirety of Ireland, “standard” and Northern.
Nope. Great Britain is the large island, Ireland the second largest, and while many geography books call the whole archipelago the British Isles you’ll hear plenty of Irish object on account of “British” including the English.
I love continuously pointing out that a public figure that so many refuse to believe has faults, does indeed have faults and is disliked by many for good reason.
People are gonna bitch about the stuff they don’t like, that’s why I’m cool with you also doing the same here.
Maybe it’s because I don’t use Twitter but I haven’t actually seen any of this in years. Every single mention of Elon Musk I see is negative. From my perspective, Twitter was trash long before he bought it, even if he’s made it worse and keeps twisting the knife. All this complaining seems like a deflection by people who are addicted and need to keep rationalizing their continued use of the platform despite it being increasingly intolerable to them.
I can’t speak for your experiences or for the stats on muskies so I can’t draw anything officially meaningful, but from my experience in my network of friends there are certain groups (mostly business-centric males) who still think he’s a champion of free speech somehow.
I definitely think it’s starting to unravel a bit but there is definitely still plenty of people out there.
Like I say, people are always gonna bitch about stuff and people they don’t like because it’s easier to vent about that than to vent about our other frustrations which are simply put just way more complicated than continuing to say “bad man bad” (not to be confused as sarcasm, I simply chose to simplify this phrase for simplicity sake)
And the site was okay before, I honestly think that people hate on twitter the way other people hated on reddit for years (before it went to shit).
Musk’s changes made the site unusable, it made me leave the site permanently, even though I don’t have a replacement site to follow the artists I like (except pixiv, but that site sucks to use in Europe)
My dad is unfortunately one of those who don’t believe he has faults, and as far as I can tell he doesn’t even spend much time in 𝕏itter, so yes, plenty still believe he’s infallible, and not just those who spend to much time on his fansite
I could never hear the name Elon for the rest of my life and I would survive just fine. Just remember, soon the internet will mention nobody but Trump as well. I hate it
I believe flags are sorted alphabetically by how they are internally represented. All flags are a combination of two special letter-symbols. For the UK flag, these two symbols are “GB”, therefore the UK flag should be much earlier.
🇺🇸 (Flag of the USA [code: US]) ≠ 🇺🇲 (Flag of the US Outlying Islands [code: UM])
Yes, the first US flag, which most people pick, is actually the flag of the US Outlying Islands. Whenever you see someone use the US flag emoji, check whether they accidentally used the " wrong" one.
Essentially the Unicode consortium did not want to make an international uproar by acknowledging certain countries and not acknowledging others. So rather than there being flag emojis there are 26 characters (A through Z) and when you combine two you have a country. How to display these is up to the font. I believe the standard (or at least the de facto standard) is to use countries’ 2 letter ISO abbreviations. This also means the Unicode standard does not need to be changed for the addition or removal of countries.
So it gets tricky. Why do they have so many coded when only one would do? Well, how would they render the other when someone puts it in? Or what if there is a different font being used on the selector that renders them differently?
The consortium was forced to include flags, they never wanted to have them in first place, but they were technically already there when they inherited the curating of emoji. They are actively trying to find ways of getting rid of flags altogether. Too much politic flak all the time.
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