“For younger people, the thumbs-up emoji is used to be really passive-aggressive,” a 24-year-old Redditor wrote. “It’s super rude if someone just sends you a thumbs up,” they added.

(Interestingly, no emoji has ever been deleted from the Unicode set.) There are now 3,790 in all (including the eight newest). According to Unicode, 92% of the world’s online population uses them.

Be the first to comment. To Gen Z, that classic smiley face emoji isn’t all sunshine — it’s more of a smug, side-eye smirk that can come off as passive-aggressive in texts like above.