Apparently the Unicode people are irked that people are misusing emoji to represent things they're not supposed to ("No, that one's not for anger, it's for satisfaction!"). Part of the problem is that emoji use a lot of visual shortcuts from Japanese visual arts, manga, etc., and those aren't necessarily recognized by Cousin Fred in Boston — who looks at some guy with steam coming out of his nose and mis-interprets it as fury. Or who sees a snot bubble on an emoji and uses it to indicate that he's under the weather.
Unicode is proposing labeling the emoji more clearly and changing some visual aspects of them to make them less confusing to us Westerners (though they are apparently being sensitive to whether such changes would affect how the Japanese recognize them).
My immediate thought (and one that came through in this article) was, "Hey, if I see that as something in particular, and use it that way, am I really wrong?"
Diving in a bit deeper, though, I found the Unicode proposals (http://www.unicode.org/review/pri294/pri294-emoji-image-background.html) … and the issue is really less "You're using it wrong" (well, there's a bit of that), as much as "Different vendors are portraying it differently." Apple, Google, and Microsoft examples for the ones Unicode is concerned about are all shown, as well as the official Unicode glyphs, and the differences between them can be a bit startling (and certainly open to variant interpretation).
The problem is not whether an IM I send in the US will be seen different in Japan, but whether an IM I send from my Android phone will convey a different emoji meaning when a friend with an iPhone gets it. It's not bad interpretations, it's bad graphic consistency.
That I can get behind, even if I don't agree with all of Unicode's suggested calls.
Wait until they learn about how these 🍆🍒 are used…