  Emojis have established themselves as a popular means of communication in
online messaging. Despite the apparent ubiquity in these image-based tokens,
however, interpretation and ambiguity may allow for unique uses of emojis to
appear. In this paper, we present the first examination of emoji usage by
hacktivist groups via a study of the Anonymous collective on Twitter. This
research aims to identify whether Anonymous affiliates have evolved their own
approach to using emojis. To do this, we compare a large dataset of Anonymous
tweets to a baseline tweet dataset from randomly sampled Twitter users using
computational and qualitative analysis to compare their emoji usage. We utilise
Word2Vec language models to examine the semantic relationships between emojis,
identifying clear distinctions in the emoji-emoji relationships of Anonymous
users. We then explore how emojis are used as a means of conveying emotions,
finding that despite little commonality in emoji-emoji semantic ties, Anonymous
emoji usage displays similar patterns of emotional purpose to the emojis of
baseline Twitter users. Finally, we explore the textual context in which these
emojis occur, finding that although similarities exist between the emoji usage
of our Anonymous and baseline Twitter datasets, Anonymous users appear to have
adopted more specific interpretations of certain emojis. This includes the use
of emojis as a means of expressing adoration and infatuation towards notable
Anonymous affiliates. These findings indicate that emojis appear to retain a
considerable degree of similarity within Anonymous accounts as compared to more
typical Twitter users. However, their are signs that emoji usage in Anonymous
accounts has evolved somewhat, gaining additional group-specific associations
that reveal new insights into the behaviours of this unusual collective.
