Facebook Publishes Report On Expressions Of Online Laughter

But given that Facebook is a site that has almost 1 billion users, at someone point we’ve all used Haha or Hehe or even Lols or emojis when interacting on it, so this sounds fairly familiar.

Of course Facebook’s data is restricted for a month and limited since it looks at US cities only.

Facebook just conducted a deep data analysis of how Americans indicate when they are laughing online… and the company’s researchers found something interesting.

Do you “haha” or “lol“? And a rise of emoji use has started to threaten written words. If someone really tickles your amusing bone, do you settle for a polite “haha” or go all in with a mildly deranged “hahahaha”?

The clear victor was the “Haha” with 51 percent of uses.

The study concluded: “The maps broadly show that haha and hehe are more popular on the west coast, emoji are the weapon of choice in the midwest, and southern states are fond of lol”. Typically I’m an “lol” girl who mashes her keyboard with “HAHAHAHhahajakakjahaahkajkjjsdhfkajdsfk” to convey real, body-quaking laughter. Online social networking giant Facebook has apparently done a bonafide research on the various acronyms, abbreviations and expressions people use during online interactions to express amusement, and published a whole report titled “The Not-So-Universal Language of Laughter”.

“We did the matching with regular expressions which automatically identified laughter in the text, including variants of haha, hehe, emoji, and lol”, researchers said in a blog post.

The team found that across all age groups (13 to 70), the most common laughs are still “haha”, “hahaha“, “hahahaha”, and only then followed by “hehe”.