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The Changing Online Language of Hearts



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How to show a heart — the universal symbol of love — has shifted on the internet over the years, driven by new technology. Sheera Frenkel, who reports on social media from San Francisco, watched dozens of videos on how to make —, in a single line. But they could also take up dozens of lines to depict elaborate hearts with arrows piercing them or roses woven in.Teenagers had to be in the know to successfully clip and save those hearts, and new ones were constantly being created, Mr. Higgins said. “People would copy and iterate on versions of the hearts by putting them in their AOL away messages or profiles,” he said.The emoji eraAs mobile phones became popular earlier this century, emojis — small images that could appear alongside text — were born. Among the first to be drawn was a red heart, created in 1999 by a Japanese artist, Shigetaka Kurita.Heart emojis did not become widely available until 2010 when a Google software team petitioned to get emojis recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that functions like the United Nations in maintaining text standards across computers. Once the group recognized the emojis, they became widely available on mobile devices, and then were quickly adapted by social media companies like Facebook.Today, the red heart is one of the most popular emojis. It was the second most used in the world in 2019 and 2021, according to polls by the Unicode Consortium, beaten only by the “crying/laughing” face, which teenagers have since declared is not cool. (The consortium does not have a poll for 2022.)“The red heart is the most O.G. emoji,” said Jennifer Daniel, the head of the emoji subcommittee at the Unicode Consortium. “We now have a lot of variations, like blue, green and purple hearts. We have broken hearts and Cupid hearts. But the red heart emoji has a distinct meaning that conveys something lovely across the world.”TikTok shapesThere are acceptable ways of showing hearts on social media now — and ways that are not. It’s often determined by your age.“If you want to know around how old someone is, but you don’t want to ask them directly, ask them to make a heart with their hands,” said Julia Carolan, 25, a social media influencer from New York, in a TikTok video last year.Over the video’s next 21 seconds, Ms. Carolan demonstrated that if someone formed a heart with all the fingers on both hands, it meant that person was “a millennial … an adult.” Only Gen Z, she said, makes hearts using just the middle and index fingers, as if it were a secret code.The video, which has been liked more than 40,000 times, is one of hundreds on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other social media sites that discuss the right way to make a heart with your fingers.“What’s funny is that I can barely do the Gen Z heart with my hands. Maybe it’s because I’m almost a millennial myself,” Ms. Carolan said in an interview. “The thing now, with TikTok and these videos, is that you’re really putting yourself, your face and body out there. Whatever you are doing, especially if it is showing love, has to feel authentic.”In some regions, people have their own ways of making hearts to post on social media. In parts of Asia, for instance, hearts are formed by placing the thumb and index finger together, in a pinching motion.Every year brings a new, trendy way for teenagers to create heart shapes to post online, said Mr. Sullivan, the TikTok creator.“Part of it is the exclusivity, especially in the beginning, of just a small group of people knowing what the new symbol or hand movement is,” he said. “The moment it becomes too big, it becomes cringe.”But what is old can also become new again. There’s been a resurgence recently of “vintage hearts” in videos, like the emoticon …

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