My messenger blows up emojis when I send them with no other text, and I used these side by side and the one on the right has a smaller blue square than the left one.

Taking a screenshot and zooming in, the grainy extrapolated pixels appear to be in exactly the same pattern. Very odd indeed.

Apparently because of how flag codes work, the USA and US Minor Outlying Islands technically have different flags in unicode, even though they’re the same flag. There are countless people who have used the USA minor Outlying Islands flag instead of the regular USA flag.