Elon Musk’s X Quietly Removes Bitcoin, MAGA Emojis From Hashtags

Bitcoin and crypto hashtags on X will no longer automatically display emojis.

X did not publicly announce the removal, and the reason behind this apparent change is unclear.

Bitcoin and crypto hashtags will no longer be accompanied by auto-generated emojis on social app X, which is owned by Elon Musk and hosts some of the largest active cryptocurrency communities.

As of Friday morning in Europe, X’s social media accounts or press pages had not publicly announced the removal.

Crypto users on X began posting comments early Friday saying they could no longer see emojis when they posted “#bitcoin” on the service. Some later learned that the hashtags #bnbchain and #cryptocom, which also show emojis, were no longer displaying branded images.

As of Friday European time, the #MAGA emoji, which previously featured Republican candidate Donald Trump, was also removed ahead of Trump’s scheduled appearance at the ongoing Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville.

Bitcoin emojis were first introduced in 2020 when Jack Dorsey became the owner of what was then known as Twitter X. Dorsey attempted to popularize the bitcoin symbol into Unicode, a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium and designed to support the use of text in all the world’s writing systems that can be digitized.

Twitter’s then-name X reportedly charged companies up to $1 million to add a branded emoji or symbol after a particular hashtag in an effort to differentiate their brand from competitors and generate interest among consumers.