From the Eurogamer interview… Insight into the origin of the Emoji tweets 
“I remember the conversation, which is going back to my own personal sort of journey on No Man’s Sky,” he says. "It’s my social media account and people were urging me to post more, and I was just like, ‘I’m done! I have no interest in this! I’m not going on social media! … My time should be spent just making the game!’, right?
“That’s sort of always been my attitude since release. That we should speak to people through the work that we do and the updates that we do. And I was having this sort of argument back and forth, and people were like, 'Go on, just put something out, just say something. And I was like, what’s the minimum we can say and get away with it? And someone was like, one letter. And then someone else said an emoji, and I was like, ‘Fine, I’ll do an emoji, and then that’s all I’m doing on social media!’”