what does 👉 (empty square box) mean on twitter?

[Jovan]

I keep seeing people with 👉 or 👉👉👉👉 (1 or more) in their tweets randomly. What does it mean?

[Jeroonk]

Those are special UTF-8 symbol codes. UTF-8 is a standard for text encoding, which is basically a huge table of all possible letters, characters, modifiers etc. which exist in the world (and then some). Each letter of text is assigned a number in this table. (The letter "a" for example has code 97).

If you read a website or a text-document, your computer actually just sees a series of (binary) numbers. Using an encoding standard like UTF8, it can look up those numbers in a table, and display them as the corresponding text on your screen.

That specific one, is located at code-point 128073 (U+01F449), which... doesn't seem to have a character assigned to it. Your computer can't find it, so it displays a generic empty box, to indicate that it is a missing letter.

I think either that persons' phone or twitter messed up somewhere, and did a wrong letter-conversion. It could be that that person wanted to tweet an obscure symbol (to make a smiley or something) and it got lost somewhere in the conversion.

[Latonja Bonds]

People with iPhones are able to tweet like that. If you don't have an iphone you can't see what they saying!