Abstract
Social media platforms have become central to modern communication, yet they also harbor offensive content that challenges platform safety and inclusivity. While prior research has primarily focused on textual indicators of offense, the role of emojis, ubiquitous visual elements in online discourse, remains underexplored. Emojis, despite being rarely offensive in isolation, can acquire harmful meanings through symbolic associations, sarcasm, and contextual misuse. In this work, we systematically examine emoji contributions to offensive Twitter messages, analyzing their distribution across offense categories and how users exploit emoji ambiguity. To address this, we propose an LLM-powered, multi-step moderation pipeline that selectively replaces harmful emojis while preserving the tweet’s semantic intent. Human evaluations demonstrate that our approach effectively reduces offensiveness while preserving semantic integrity. Our analysis also reveals heterogeneous effects across offense types, offering nuanced insights for online communication and emoji moderation.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.nlpcss-1.19
- Volume:
[Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science](/volumes/2026.nlpcss-1/)- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego
- Editors:
[Dallas Card](/people/dallas-card/),[Anjalie Field](/people/anjalie-field/),[Katherine Keith](/people/katherine-keith/),[Julia Mendelsohn](/people/julia-mendelsohn/)- Venues:
[NLP+CSS](/venues/nlpcss/)|[WS](/venues/ws/)- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 322–340
- Language:
- URL:
[https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.19/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.19/)- DOI:
[10.18653/v1/2026.nlpcss-1.19](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.nlpcss-1.19)- Cite (ACL):
- Yuhang Zhou, Yimin Xiao, Wei Ai, and Ge Gao. 2026. The Hidden Language of Harm: Examining the Role of Emojis in Harmful Online Communication and Content Moderation. InProceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science, pages 322–340, San Diego. Association for Computational Linguistics. - Cite (Informal):
[The Hidden Language of Harm: Examining the Role of Emojis in Harmful Online Communication and Content Moderation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.19/)(Zhou et al., NLP+CSS 2026)- PDF:
[https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.19.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.nlpcss-1.19.pdf)