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Penny Mordaunt launches petition: #GoodMannersEmojis campaign

Portsmouth North Conservatives
Nov 6, 2019
2 min read

Please sign our #GoodMannersEmoji petition and join the global call for new emojis to help identify, call out and discourage rude behaviour or bullying on social media platforms. By showing support you will help us persuade the Unicode Committee to have the emojis installed on every device manufactured. The campaign is supported by The Jo Cox Foundation, Hollaback and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London.

About the campaign

There are ways people can deal with the most extreme forms of cyber bullying and abuse on social media, from reporting a person, blocking, identifying and reporting Bots or going to the police. However, there is a considerable amount of lower level bad behaviour, especially on twitter, which is creating an aggressive and abusive atmosphere. This is particularly the case in political discourse. In the real world we have developed social norms to deal with this kind of bullying, but we have not yet established these online.

This is affecting politicians, but also others in public life. From school governors, to charity trustees and campaigners.

Anonymous abuse, impersonation, saying critical things about a person on social media and copying the subject in, are all examples of behaviours which are difficult to respond to. The absence of a way of responding to this poor behaviour is resulting in it going unchecked. It is becoming the norm.

Rt Hon Penny Mordaunt MP is working with The Iconfactory to develop some emojis to help identify, call out and discourage rude behaviour or bullying on social media platforms. The designs are friendly, non-confrontational and a little bit sassy. They can be used to notify someone that you think they have overstepped the mark, or others that there is an issue. Similarly, if you think one of your friends is guilty of bad behaviour you can send them an emoji privately to suggest they ought to calm down, much easier and more likely to happen than an awkward conversation. If someone has a lot of the emojis on their timeline, especially if they are coming from all sides of the political spectrum or debate, then it may cause them to think about their attitude online, or demonstrate to service providers that a person is a problem user.

Six emojis designs have been launched today together with a call for further ideas and requests of support. The emojis will then be pitched to the Unicode Committee to have them installed on all devices manufactured as part of the standard emoji menu.

Penny Mordaunt said,

“The limited way people can respond to disrespectful behaviour on social media is resulting in polite, sensible people becoming a silent majority on these platforms. This affects politicians but also many others in public life, from school governors to public servants to charity trustees. It is my hope that these new tools can help us all create the social norms that are so lacking online.”

Politicians and campaign groups cross the world are being asked to support the initiative. This includes the prospective presidential candidates in the United States and the leaders of each political party in the UK.

Early supporters of the initiative include the Jo Cox Foundation and Hollaback.