I'm currently developing a web app that pulls tweets from the Twitter API and displays them on a website. For reference, I'm using Google Chrome on Mac OS X 10.9 to test it.

I've noticed that certain tweets with Emoji emoticons display as squares, or the icon for "unrecognized character". Which originally led me to believe that data was being garbled somehow by the backend. But when I copy into or display the characters using a Mac system font...

![Selecting and right clicking the unknown characters](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uP1AA.png)

So what's going on here, and what would be the best way to handle it? I'm using Google's Open Sans font on my site, if that matters, but I've tried a few fonts to no avail.