What started as a tweet about the differences between two tech giants' burger emojis has ended in a light-hearted suggestion that the debate might start World War III.

In a tweet on Sunday, Thomas Baekdal, founder of Baekdal Media, highlighted the differences between the construction of Apple's and Google's burger emojis, emphasising the placement of the cheese.

Baekdal's tweet has sparked a huge debate among burger fans with many discussing the best way to assemble the perfect burger.

His tweet was retweeted more than 12,000 times (and rising rapidly) with more than 1000 comments, many of which highlighted the construction of burger emojis used by other tech companies, including Samsung, Microsoft and Huawei.

This tweet caught the attention of Google chief executive Sundar Pichai who said jokingly that the company would "drop everything else" in a bid to figure out the ideal assembly of its burger emoji if the public could agree on a preferred order.

Apple's burger emoji has a slice of tomato at the top, followed by cheese, the patty and then lettuce.

The order of Google's burger emoji is quite different, with lettuce at the top, followed by tomato, patty and cheese at the base.

In his "perfect burger tutorial", celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay chose the order of tomato, patty and cheese with lettuce at the base, but many Twitter users disagree with his assembly.

Many believe that the perfect burger constitutes placing tomato on top, then lettuce and cheese with the patty at the bottom.

The discussion was very in-depth for the 140-character limit of the social media platform.

Many discussed the need to cook the cheese on the patty and others said the lettuce provided an insulation layer between the hot and cold sections of the burger.

In a tweet on Monday morning, Baekdal joked that his discussion might be the catalyst to an eventual World War III.

Emojis are created and overseen by the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit corporation that manages the international representation of graphics, languages and characters on different technology devices.

According to the "Frequently Asked Questions" section on its website, the Unicode Consortium says that it has no direct design input into each emoji and that the specific design is up for each technology company.

"The Unicode Consortium provides character code charts that show a representative glyph (in a black-and-white text presentation), but the colorful emoji presentation on phones and computers is up to each vendor."