‘Loudly crying’ replaces ‘tears of joy’ face as top Twitter emoji

The Loudly Crying Face emoji has overtaken Face with Tears of Joy to become the most popular emoji used on Twitter, in a move which is somewhat fitting for the times we’re in.

Despite the news being shared on April’s Fools Day, the online emoji directory Emojipedia insisted it wasn’t a joke, and that the cry laughing icon – loathed by Gen Z-ers – has been dethroned.

“Looking at the data, we can see that Face with Tears of Joy has been stalling in growth for quite some time.

“Gen Z’s relative dislike of [Face with Tears of Joy] compared to older generations may factor in here, but it would be remiss of us not to mention the ongoing global pandemic as another potential factor. Is there simply less to laugh about now,” Emojipedia mused in a blog post.

The article goes on to feature multiple graphs, with one showing the Face with Tears of Joy emoji making a steep and rapid decline between June 2019 and March this year.

This is in contrast to Loudly Crying Face, which has seen a steady increase in the same timeframe.

Commenting on why this particular emoji has seen a rise in popularity, Emojipedia said: “While it can of course be used to express the sadness or grief usually associated with such a volume of tears, many emoji users view its expression as being overly melodramatic.

For some people, [Loudly Crying Face] is simply a better laughing emoji than [Face with Tears of Joy]. And that’s okay. There’s no single right or wrong way to use an emoji.

“Some feel quite strongly that it shouldn’t be used to convey sadness at all. After all, there are many emojis which appear to convey a more sincere form of sadness than Loudly Crying Face.”

While users debate whether the Face with Tears of Joy emoji is no longer ‘cool’, it appears as though another discussion is underway over whether Loudly Crying Face can in fact be used to denote happiness rather than sadness:

Either way, when things get tough, you can either laugh or cry, and it seems like we’ve now chosen the latter.