Facebook tests ‘downvote’ feature for some users in the United States
However, this was not a dislike button, a spokesperson for the company said.
Social media giant Facebook is testing a “downvote” button on the comments sections of a set of public pages, The Daily Beast reported.
Several users could see the new option on Thursday in the comments section of posts within Facebook groups and old Facebook memories content. “We are not testing a dislike button,” an unidentified spokesperson for the company said. “We are exploring a feature for people to give us feedback about comments on public page posts. This is running for a small set of people in the US only.”
This development comes after years of talk of a “dislike” button, Gizmodo reported. The company’s founder Mark Zuckerberg had said in a town hall meeting in 2015 that the company was working on a “dislike” option. But nothing came of it.
At present, social media website Reddit is the only one that uses the “downvote” option to help crowdsource the ranking of comments and content. However, often these votes were not visible to other users, and a number of communities turned off this feature to prevent mass-downvoting, known as brigading, of controversial content, Gizmodo reported.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian Sr too commented on Facebook’s latest experiment, saying it is the “sincerest form of flattery”.