We planned to improve Emojigraph "4th July" emoji collection before Independence Day.
I found 2019.07.04. tweets on Internet Archive. The total count of tweets in the data set - 4,667,068.
Further filtering by keywords or hashtags: "4th of July", "independenceday", "4thofjuly", "fourthofjuly", "thefourth", "julyfourth", "july4th", and "#independence" - gave me 18,142 tweets related to the 4th of July celebration.
After extracting and counting emojis from these tweets, I got frequency per emoji, that best visualized as Emoji Cloud.
Let's look closer to the top 10.
🇺🇸 Flag of the United States is the number one emoji with a total share of 32.46%.
The second most popular emoji in the sample, the ❤️Red Heart emoji is often used not only in the direct meaning of love, but as representations of the U.S. flag colors with 💙Blue Heart, 🔵Blue Circle, 🔴Red Circle, ⚪White Circle, and 🤍White Heart emojis.
The 🎆Fireworks emoji, along with the 🎉Party Popper, 💥Collision, and 🎇Sparkler often used as symbols of celebration.
The 😂Face with Tears of Joy emoji is well-known as the most popular on the platform and could be found across almost any tweets sample.
A lot of emoji from the sample are regular in pop-culture symbols of the United States.
The red, blue and white-colored heart and circle emojis stand for "Old Glory Red", "Old Glory Blue", and "White" colors of the American flag.
And the ⚾Baseball, the 🗽Statue Of Liberty, the🦅Eagle, the 🏈American Football, the 🤠Cowboy Hat Face, and other emojis from Figure 2 represent the iconic symbols of the U.S.
While ⚾Baseball is the top sports emoji used 193 times, this could be explained by the popularity of the Google interactive Doodle Baseball game released on 4th July last year.
The 🏈American Football emoji is the second sports emoji used only 22 times across the sample.
45 unique food emojis were counted in the sample. These emojis were used 395 times in total, accounting for 2.8% of the emojis counted.
The most popular food & drink emojis are the 🌭Hot Dog, the 🍻Clinking Beer Mugs, the 🎂Birthday Cake, the 🥧Pie, and the 🍔Hamburger.
And to better understand the semantics behind the tweets, I did an Independence Day tweets word cloud.
Next, I plan to conduct a similar analysis of the 4th of July emojis in 2020 and compare it to 2019. Check here for the update.
UPDATE:
Yesterday I've collected 167,679 tweets that had keywords: "independenceday", "4thofJuly2020", "4thofJuly", "4thofjulyweekend", "fourthofjuly", "thefourth", "July4th." There are a total of 134,250 emojis counted in these tweets, and 1,730 of them are unique.
While the Emoji Cloud looks pretty similar to the 2019 version, and emojis like 🇺🇸Flag: United States, ❤️Red Heart, and 🎆Fireworks saved their position on top, there are emojis that had changed their rank significantly.
The decrease in usage of ⚾Baseball emoji was expected, as in this year Google’s latest homepage Doodle is bringing the fireworks, and sparklers.
But the most notable rank change came to ◾Black Medium-Small Square emoji.
The rise of ✨Sparkles could be connected to the Google Doodle.
C-19 and BLM also elevated the usage of the 😷Face with Medical Mask, the 🖤Black Heart, the ✊🏾Raised Fist: Medium-Dark Skin Tone, the ✊🏽Raised Fist: Medium Skin Tone, the ✊🏿Raised Fist: Dark Skin Tone.
To visualize top emojis relevant changes, I have separated flags, as the U.S. flag has a major share.
While the 🇺🇲 U.S. Outlying Islands flag emoji usage elevated, the misuse of the 🇱🇷 Liberia flag emoji decline in 2020.
Share this article:
