According to reports, Microsoft’s employees were surprised
by a newly added custom emoji feature on Teams after they spotted an emoji of
Pepe the Frog in reactions and messages in the primitive internal versions of Teams.
Pepe the Frog has been a trademark in itself for a very long
time and emojis of the character have been integrated in Discord servers and on
Twitch, representing cheerful responses.
Currently, Teams only supports a Unicode emoji panel for videos and messages, along with a Giphy service. Although the custom emoji feature is expected to roll out, that doesn’t mean that the functionality will appear to users in the form of Pepe the Frog memes. Ultimately, the IT admins will control how custom emojis will be accessed and used in Teams.
While Pepe the Frog is mostly associated with positive sentiments,
the character has had a history of being used for hateful motives too, such as
when it was adopted by white supremacists and the Anti-Defamation League, years
ago. Since then, Pepe’s creator Matt Furie and supporters have run a ‘#SavePepe’
campaign to get back the original intentions associated with the character.
The custom emoji feature in Teams is currently in an early stage
of testing and there’s no news from Microsoft as of yet to confirm any details
regarding it.
