One of the earliest appearances of the emoticon was posted to the Finnish image board Ylilauta[21] at 8:45 a.m. EST on November 18th, 2012. Posted on the site’s International board, “( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)” was used as a comment in a thread about whether or not administrators should change the settings on their spam detector. Text Face
By 11 a.m. (ET) that same day, the face had been posted to 4chan’s /v/[8] (video games) board, followed by similar posts on /sp/[7] (sports) and /b/[9], where numerous users were eventually banned (shown below, right) for spamming the boards with the emoticon. A screenshot of these bans was also shared on FunnyJunk[6], where it earned 3900 points and gained more than 101,000 views.
