dislike_button

Facebook actually considering a “dislike” button

During an interview in California today, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the social media giant is actually “thinking about” adding a “dislike” button to their platform. According to the BBC, “He said the site would need to find a way to make sure it did not become a way to demean people's posts.”

“One of things we've thought about for quite a while is what's the right way to make it so that people can easily express a broader range of emotions,” Zuckerberg said during the Q&A. “A lot of times people share things on Facebook that are sad moments in their lives. Often people tell us that they don't feel comfortable pressing 'like' because 'like' isn't the appropriate sentiment.”

Zuckerberg added, “Some people have asked for a dislike button because they want to say, 'That thing isn't good.' That's not something that we think is good for the world. The thing that I think is very valuable is that there are more sentiments that people want to express.”

The BBC points out that an enhanced method of expressing negative sentiment would make advertisers nervous, because users could just “dislike” all of the advertising content interrupting their feeds. “They need to keep their advertisers happy,” ad exec Paul Coggins told the BBC. “I would think it highly unlikely that they would come up with a button that says you can 'dislike.'”

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