For years, Facebook users have been demanding the rollout of a "dislike" button on the platform. While reports of such a feature arriving imminently have surfaced intermittently, the closest thing to it that we have right now is a plethora of reactions, which include "Wow", "Angry", and "Sad", but not the highly anticipated "Dislike".
However, it now appears that the firm is working on something similar for the platform, but only for comment moderation.
According to reports, Facebook is testing a "Downvote" button on a limited scale, which allows users to mark comments as misleading, off-topic. or offensive. Downvoting such a comment will hide it from the user, but the cumulative downvote count will not be visible to the public. In a statement to The Verge, a spokesperson from Facebook had the following to say:
We are not testing a dislike button. 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 mechanism essentially flags what someone may deem a questionable comment, but it doesn't seem like it will downrank the comment for everyone else as well.
While there's no word yet on when the button will be rolled out to everyone, or whether if it'll even be made available globally, it could be the first step in fixing Facebook's issues, a mammoth task which the company's CEO took on as his personal challenge for 2018.
Source: The Verge
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