Facebook’s New ‘Dislike’ Function Isn’t What You Think

Announced last month, Facebook’s new ‘dislike’ button has finally been unveiled, and it’s not as we expected it. Instead of a simple ‘thumbs down’ – a reverse of the familiar ‘like’ button, which founder Mark Zuckerberg feared would be open to abuse – Facebook will be providing users the ability to express their emotions in relation to posts through a series of emojis.

Rolling out tomorrow in Spain and the Republic of Ireland, Facebook Reactions aims to encourage greater engagement and “empathy” with user posts though the six emojis: ‘Love’, ‘Haha’, ‘Yay’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’, and ‘Angry’.

“People come to Facebook to share all kinds of things —  whether that’s updates that are happy, sad, funny or thought-provoking,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “And we’ve heard you’d like more ways to celebrate, commiserate or laugh together. That’s why we are testing Reactions, an extension of the Like button, to give you more ways to share your reaction to a Facebook post in a quick and easy way.”

While Facebook has not set a timeframe for the worldwide launch of Facebook Reactions, it is expected to slowly roll out to other countries over the course of this year.

Thank you VentureBeat for providing us with this information.