# Pointing-down emoji

Part of [The AI Tells Index](https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells). A tell signals low effort. It does not identify an author. Skilled writers produce every shape listed here, some of them daily, and automated detectors misread those writers for it at rates measured above 60 percent on non-native English prose. Nothing in this index proves that a machine wrote anything. Read an entry as one piece of evidence to weigh against the false-positive notes printed beside it.

## Facts

- Id: pointing-down-emoji
- Category: Platform-specific (platform)
- Subcategory: engagement-furniture
- Also known as: down-pointing hand, link in the comments pointer
- Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing.
- Severity: low
- Evidence grade: feedsquad-observed (our own corpus only, no external attestation)
- Languages: en
- Added: 2026-10-06
- Updated: 2026-10-06
- Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/pointing-down-emoji

## Description

The down-pointing hand placed at the end of a post to send the reader to a link, a comment or a list below. It stands in for a sentence that would say what is down there. The pattern matches the emoji in any skin tone.

## Why it reads as machine-written

The emoji is a convention of posts that move their link into the comments. Assistant drafts written in that register copy the convention, including when nothing sits below it. A pointer with nothing specific after it reads as template furniture.

## Detection

Type: deterministic (a regular expression, run as written)

Scope: document

ECMAScript regular expression. The build validator compiles it and tests it against this entry's own specimens.

```regex
\u{1F447}
```

Flags: gu

## Examples

Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts.

### Specimen 1

Before, exhibiting the tell:

> We wrote up how we cut our cloud bill in half. Full breakdown in the comments 👇

After, repaired:

> We cut our monthly cloud bill from 41,000 to 19,000 by moving batch jobs to spot instances. The write-up with the job schedule is linked in the first comment.

Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen.

## False positives

Who legitimately writes this way.

Many people who write every word of their own posts use the emoji, because their audience reads it at a glance and on a phone it is a quick signal that the link sits in a comment. Event organisers and community managers use it to point at a sign-up thread. The tell is a pointer with no statement of what is below, or a pointer under a post where nothing follows at all.

## Model attribution

No family attribution. FeedSquad has not measured the emoji by model.

## Platform notes

- linkedin: Typical of LinkedIn posts that keep the link out of the post body. No platform penalty is claimed here.

## Sources

1. FeedSquad banned-pattern registry, rule pointing_emoji (FeedSquad observation)
   Corpus: The pointing_emoji rule in FeedSquad's lint_patterns registry, seeded on 2026-06-10 and applied to agent drafts at every scheduling transition since. The registry records the rule and its rationale. No prevalence count was kept, so this is an editorial judgement rather than a measurement.
   Observed 2026-06-10

## Status history

Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page.

- 2026-10-06, Active: Opened as active with low severity. The emoji has been on FeedSquad's banned-pattern registry since June 2026 as the pointing_emoji rule. No external measurement of it exists, so the grade is our own observation.

## License

CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Attribution: The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells

Reuse the data, including commercially. Keep the attribution line.

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Dataset version 1.2.0. Schema version 1.
Part of [FeedSquad](https://feedsquad.com). Built by [Herman Foundry](https://hermanfoundry.com) from Levi, Finnish Lapland.