Elon Musk’s X removes Bitcoin and MAGA emojis

Automatically generated emojis no longer accompany Bitcoin and crypto hashtags on Elon Musk’s social platform X, which hosts some of the most active crypto communities.

According to multiple sources, X removed the Bitcoin hashtag emoji, along with a few other crypto emojis, on July 25. The reasons for removing these crypto emojis have puzzled the X crypto community.

As of Friday morning hours, the platform’s social media channels and press site had not publicly announced the removal.

Crypto users on X began complaining early Friday that they could no longer see emojis when they posted “#bitcoin” on the service. Some later discovered that hashtags #bnbchain and #cryptocom, which formerly displayed emojis, no longer display brand images.

As of Friday’s morning hours, an emoji for #MAGA featuring Republican candidate Donald Trump had also been removed, ahead of his expected appearance at the current Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville.

The emoji depicted the former president with his fist raised in the air after surviving an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in mid-July. Musk posted a photo shortly after the incident and said he was “fully” endorsing Trump as a presidential candidate.

Among the crypto emoji removals, several industry observers argued that deleting Bitcoin emojis from the platform could have a detrimental impact on the price. However, the removals were not limited to BTC. Other coins, such as Cronos and BNB, have also had their hashtags removed from the social media platform.

At this time, Bitcoin (BTC) is worth $67,796.03, up 4.9% from yesterday. BTC’s value today is 0.8% higher than what it was a week ago.

The Bitcoin emojis were initially introduced in 2020, when Jack Dorsey owned X, formerly known as Twitter. Dorsey attempted to promote the Bitcoin symbol by including it into Unicode, a text encoding standard managed by the Unicode Consortium that supports the usage of text in all digitizable writing systems.

The platform, reportedly charged companies up to $1 million to put a customized emoji or symbol after a certain hashtag to help differentiate their branding from competitors’ and generate buzz among consumers.