Facebook Dislike button arrives — in the form of reaction emoji
Options will include seven different emotions, including sadness, shock and anger, and is rolling out in the coming days
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Your support makes all the difference.Facebook has finally unveiled its solution to people’s calls for a “dislike” button — in the form of six new emoji, each representing their own feeling.
Mark Zuckerberg hinted last month that his site was looking to expand the Like button, making a way for people to communicate that they were upset by news. And the site is now rolling out its solution in the form of emoji that represent “Love”, “Haha”, “Yay”, “Wow”, “Sad” and “Angry”.
Zuckerberg said for a long time that the feature wouldn’t be integrated in the “Dislike” button that many people had asked for, and that users wanted so much that it has spawned its own scams. Since that could be used for bullying and might make users feel bad, the site was exploring ways for people to communicate that they were upset without being explicitly negative.
Facebook’s way of doing that seems to be a series of expressive “Reactions”, rather than exactly replicating the Like button. That button is still available, but the new buttons sit alongside the regular thumbs up as extra options.
As with the Like button, the reactions will appear on any post in the news feed on mobile or desktop. The number of reactions that any post has received will sit underneath the post and users will be able to see who reacted and how.
The site will start rolling out the feature in Spain and Ireland, as a test. The countries have been chosen because they’re relatively closed groups and including Spain will allow the site to try out how the emoji work for non-English users, according to Techcrunch.
Once the buttons are rolled out to a users’ feed, there’ll be no way of turning them off.
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