Facebook testing out new emotion buttons

“Reactions give you new ways to express love, awe, humor, and sadness”. With Facebook being accessed more and more on mobile devices it only made sense to introduce a range of emotive responses that could sustain and increase interaction on the social media platform.

This new functionality was teased a few weeks back by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, when he initially grabbed some headlines by suggesting it was going to be a “dislike” button.

He said this was because he had noticed that not every post on the social network deserved a like & not every moment was a good one.

In other situations, a user may post photos of a funeral or even a grave of a loved one. Zuckerberg wants Facebook users to express more emotions instead of the standard like. A dislike option, Mosseri said, wouldn’t be “in the spirit of the product we’re trying to build”.

“We’re working on it and are very close to shipping a test of it”, he said. “You’ll be able to express these reactions by long pressing or hovering over the Like button”.

Angry: This is a reaction which can be used to express how a particular post angers us. A few people are already harassed through comments and messages. This is all about giving people more scope to respond appropriately to a post, rather than actually typing something.

Now, Facebook is planning to try out the new emojis.

A spokesman had no information on the length of the trial or when it might be extended to Facebook users outside Ireland and Spain.

How did Facebook come up with the new emojis? To help choose the right emoji to join “Like”, Mosseri says Facebook consulted with several academic sociologists “about the range of human emotion”.

And while Facebook’s latest feature was rolled out to counteract the passiveness and perceived inappropriateness (i.e., “liking” a status about a tragedy) of its universal thumbs-up, Boran says it still didn’t feel appropriate to use an emoji on an update about a friend’s relationship ending. And they also track a lot of other data which has helped them in creating Reactions.