The world is a marvelous place, for people that are nice and good, and do not use emojis to threaten someone’s life. Wait, what? Yes, you’ve heard it correctly, people use emojis in a number of ways, and recently, unfortunately, this became one of the ways to express anger and show off the dark side. Well, emojis are usually fun, interesting, and easy to use, and that’s the way we use the collection, to express gratitude, love, happiness, to share something nice, or to caption something that recently happened, but in the case of Bilal Azougagh, 22 year old French citizen from Pierelatte, it just wasn’t enough. Not only that he misused the emoji collection, and violated the rules that got him three months prison sentence, but he also had to pay a fine, €1000 to his ex girlfriend. Something that for him seemed to be simple message, one of his doubtful ways to persuade her to act in his own selfish interest eventually became a story that made it to the local newspaper, and in case you sympathize with Mr. Azougagh, we assure you that once you find out all the juicy details, you’ll wonder if you have one of the similar skeletons lying in the closet somewhere. If you happen to be one of the people that tend to use pistol emoji, brace yourself for the the emoji that imprisoned this young man. One may wonder how this all occurred, well we’re here to tell you a story that caused so much fuss back in 2016.
It all began when Azougagh broke up with his girlfriend, and started texting her constantly. What could possibly go wrong, a few messages where he begged her to reconsider, and love messages that seemed innocent for pretty much anyone that knew these two love birds. He continued on texting her and in one of the messages he concluded his sentence with a dot followed by a pistol emoji, which made this girl, who decided to stay anonymous, wonder, if 22 year old Azougagh is actually forcing her into something. Later that year she decided to file a complaint, that eventually her appointed lawyer understood had a solid base for trial, and as France has a strict laws when it comes to a safety of its citizens, the trial itself was a productive on as the lawyer came up with a story, and jury sympathized.
The mentioned girlfriend managed to put everyone on her side, as she admitted that after that message, she was afraid for her life, and avoided going out, in case she may ran in to him. Sometimes she would just simply stay at home, even though she had plans, and thought about the message. It affected her state of mind, and not only that she no longer felt safe but she also suffered from nightmares and tried to stay as sane as possible, but the messages were still directed to her IP address, and still she would receive a few that really made her doubt Azougagh’s thoughts on their violent breakup. Something was wrong, and she decided to come for help.
As for the defense lawyer, and Mr. Azougagh, they claimed that this emoji was merely an icon, and that it represented no real threat for his ex-girlfriend, in any way, and considered the story to be exaggerating that, in his opinion was a manner of behavior, and rather a false accusation altogether. Azougagh also complained of the girl taking things way to seriously that ultimately initiated a trial based on a simple message that meant “nothing” as far as he was concerned and the lawyer also added that statement that was supposed to cast a doubt on the girl’s intentions.
However, the court was convinced that the message had a death threat in it, and that alone, led them to conclude that a real danger was in fact in the message that contained a pistol emoji, so judge ruled out that 22 year old Azougagh will serve 6 months, and later that was reduced to 3 months, and on top of that, he had to pay his former girlfriend a fine as well.
If by any chance, you find this unbelievable, feel free to check out the full story online, as it’s out there, and for a while people judged his girlfriend to be vengeful towards him, but still, it didn’t change the fact that the court already ruled in her favor, so until this day this case is the also only one of its sort in France, and the first time French court convicted someone of the crime based on the fact that a convict used an emoji as an intimidation tool to achieve certain affection or anything, and that’s what’s officially documented.
Emojis are now something that we cannot ignore, and it’s something that makes our lives as they are, filled with excitement, and the icons that we use to represent something more than just emotions, something that is hard to explain, but for some reason people still choose to use it in such way to disturb others, and whether the background of this story is different than what media showed us, and what court claimed, it still is no different, and we should be careful, as different interpretations lead to a problem that is not easily solved, and the problem, that we may find a bit weird and melodramatic, but still.
Emojis should be used in a different way, and even though now the Apple devices show the pistol emoji rather as a water pistol emoji to avoid confusion, some people still have the opinion about it, and in a way they have right, as pistol is rarely used to represent anything good, and most of the people avoid using it altogether, yet if you ask us, emoji collection is used mainly as an addition to a message part, not as an actual message, so everyone is advised to be cautious.