Emoji Threat: A 12-Year-Old Girl Arrested For Using Offending Emojis

A 12-year-old girl from Fairfax, Virginia was arrested for using emojis such as bomb, gun and knife in an Instagram post in December. She is now facing criminal charges.

According to Digital Trends, a resources officer from Lanier Middle School in Fairfax was notified about the girl's post on Instagram on December 14. "The officer began interviewing students and sent an emergency request to obtain the IP address of the user associated with the Instagram account," according to the report of Washington Post. "The investigation led to the 12-year-old girl, who was also a student at Lanier."

Parenting reports that the student confessed to the authorities that she posted the destructive emojis on Instagram with the name of another student. She was then accused of menacing the school and computer harassment. On the other hand, the spokesperson for Fairfax County Schools said that the threat was not credible.

The girl's mother said that her girl posted those messages with emojis in retort to the bullies her daughter was receiving. "She's a good kid," the mother said. "She's never been in trouble before. I don't think it's a case where there should have been charges."

The girl is going to appear in juvenile court on the charges filed against her at the end of this month. Dalia Topelson Ritvo, the assistant director of the Cyber Law Clinic at Harvard Law School said that the messages may be threatening but it's up to the prosecutors and the judge to decide whether the emojis were threats. " It's challenging with symbols and images to unravel that," she added.

Meanwhile, there was a similar case wherein two men were also arrested for using emojis such as finger-pointing, fist and ambulance in a Facebook post. A grand jury in New York City just pondered that the emojis that was used were a real threat to police officers.

Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguist and a founder of a company called Idibon, said that these particular cases "are all going into the fresh legal territory."