Facebook working on long-sought ‘dislike’ button

After years of pressure from users, Facebook is finally working on a dislike button. “We have an idea we think we’re going to be ready to test soon”.

Zuckerberg says it won’t be a “Dislike” button exactly. Zuckerberg said it was a surprisingly complicated task to build the button.

He said what he learned over the years, though, is that people aren’t looking for the ability to down vote other posts. “But your friends and people want to be able to express that they understand”. “Not every moment is a good moment”, Zuckerberg continued. A “Dislike” button would give too much power to negative people, and turn each post into an emotional gamble. During a question-and-answer session streamed live on Facebook on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg said the company was testing alternatives to the “Like” button.

Zuckerberg has previously explained the reasoning behind the company’s dislike for a “Dislike” button.

Unfortunately, “dislike” is such a simple word that using it is unlikely to “express empathy” and other complex emotions so Facebook would probably have to come up with another name for it. The two will discuss “how communities can work together to address social and economic challenges”.

“There is already enough hate on Facebook and social media”, Atiq Haneef of Pakistan commented on an online version of this article on the Facebook page of The New York Times.

And with good reason: Unlike reddit, Facebook’s feed is the product of a sophisticated algorithm, which means it would need to be taught how to handle the new button. He said that Facebook will be giving a button for its users that would express something beyond the popular “like” button.

“The choice of “like” as a primary signal in the world’s biggest social network has substantive political consequences”, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in an open letter to Facebook’s product team posted in August on Medium.

Rather, what you will be able to hit is some form of an empathy button when facing a tough situation where clicking “like” just feels wrong.