Having read the article, it doesn’t seem to explain anything here. They’re saying the = signs are either preceding UTF-8 sequence (hex) or used to indicate newlines in sentences that exceed SMTP line length (76 characters).
y is not valid hex, so =9y isn’t a UTF-8 sequence, and the line is way less than 76 characters.
It said 😛😛😛19yo encoded as =D83D=DE1B=D83D=DE1B=D83D=DE1B=␍␊19yo, with =␍␊ added to break the line at 76 chars. Some encoding error in the export replaced ␍␊ with ␊, and =␊1 isn’t a valid QP code. A buggy converter then incorrectly replaced it with =, leaving =9yo.
If it’s emoji that are being stripped, then that opens a whole load of possible missing meanings/implications in messages. Like it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some kind of code where a particular emoji followed by a legal age actually means something else, like a simple age - x calculation
Although most of what I’ve seen in there leads me to believe that they, for the most part, weren’t speaking in codes. Sometimes they smugly hint at a subject without mentioning it at all, but most of the time they’re just like “yeah we’ll be doing some crimes starting at 8:30pm tomorrow, make sure you’re ready to do plenty of crime!”
Yeah, if emojis and other special characters have been stripped, a lot of these messages could change meaning entirely, that’s a pretty big deal if so.
It’s not OCR but rather this: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/02/02/whats-up-with-all-those-equals-signs-anyway/
I don’t understand it fully but it smells right to me
Having read the article, it doesn’t seem to explain anything here. They’re saying the = signs are either preceding UTF-8 sequence (hex) or used to indicate newlines in sentences that exceed SMTP line length (76 characters).
y is not valid hex, so =9y isn’t a UTF-8 sequence, and the line is way less than 76 characters.
I think they stripped all the emojis.
Possible explanation:
It said
😛😛😛19yoencoded as=D83D=DE1B=D83D=DE1B=D83D=DE1B=␍␊19yo, with=␍␊added to break the line at 76 chars. Some encoding error in the export replaced␍␊with␊, and=␊1isn’t a valid QP code. A buggy converter then incorrectly replaced it with=, leaving=9yo.I haven’t counted the characters to see if this is plausible, but you can play with something like this to see if anything lines up: https://textmagictools.com/tools/quoted-printable-converter
If it’s emoji that are being stripped, then that opens a whole load of possible missing meanings/implications in messages. Like it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some kind of code where a particular emoji followed by a legal age actually means something else, like a simple age - x calculation
Although most of what I’ve seen in there leads me to believe that they, for the most part, weren’t speaking in codes. Sometimes they smugly hint at a subject without mentioning it at all, but most of the time they’re just like “yeah we’ll be doing some crimes starting at 8:30pm tomorrow, make sure you’re ready to do plenty of crime!”
Yeah, if emojis and other special characters have been stripped, a lot of these messages could change meaning entirely, that’s a pretty big deal if so.