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To be fair, not even the US govt recognizes the Taiwan flag. One could say that Apple it's following US guidance on this.

> the White House deleted a social media post on COVID-19 vaccine donations that included Taiwan's flag. A spokesman for the White House National Security Council called the use of the flag "an honest mistake" by the team handling graphics and social media that should not be viewed as a shift in U.S. policy towards Taipei

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-asks-us-no...



> One could say that Apple it's following US guidance on this.

Emoji are governed by the Unicode Consortium, not the US government. In this case, the Taiwan flag is character number 1848, codes: U+1F1F9 U+1F1FC


Unicode doesn't have the flag of Taiwan, it has a way of encoding "tw" in the context of an ISO county code.


I pulled the above from the Unicode Consoritum's specs.


Which parts? Maybe they do mention it along with other flags in examples, as far as I know any actual official specifications are intentionally coy on the matter.

I.e. the Unicode consortium explicitly didn't want to get into the mess of deciding whether Palestine, Taiwan etc. are "real countries", or need to release updates if one country annexed another etc.

So the official standards for the regional indicator symbols[2] just provide a way to encode two-letter ISO country codes, leaving it the implementation's and ISO's problem to map that to political entities.

1. https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Flags

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol


You are describing how flag emoji work.


This is an really wide stretch considering that I can type the Taiwan flag emoji in the US and any country that isn't China or claimed by China.




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