It’s understandable. Back in the old old days, these 😱 were often called emoticons. The reason was that the chat software that people used to automatically replaced ;-) by 😉. The menu was the same and the name of this menu was emoticon.
One of the most famous example of this is MSN Messenger.
second a few other comments, a lot of people conflating emoticons and emojis
Very true. Also, I believe you forgot to escape the 2nd ^ symbol? I think it should look like this:
=>^.^<=
It’s understandable. Back in the old old days, these 😱 were often called emoticons. The reason was that the chat software that people used to automatically replaced ;-) by 😉. The menu was the same and the name of this menu was emoticon.
One of the most famous example of this is MSN Messenger.
People keep the habit to call them emoticons.