Facebook Testing ‘Downvote’ Button For Comments

Back in the early days of Facebook, users could react to posts by “Liking” them, but that was the only thing they could do. We had heard that Facebook was testing a “Dislike” button, but ultimately Facebook went with “Reactions” which allowed users to convey a variety of emotions to react to posts and comments.

However according to a report from The Daily Beast, Facebook is now testing a “downvote” button. This isn’t to be confused with a “Dislike” button because according to a Facebook spokesperson, “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 U.S. only.”

As you can see in the screenshot above, the downvote button is only appearing for comments where users can downvote comments, which presumably will be similar to how certain website commenting features work. Assuming it works the same, basically downvoted comments won’t show up so highly on comments, or it could even be hidden.

This could be a way for users to deal with troll-ish or abusive comments, where users can downvote such comments to prevent them from appearing. Whether or not this feature will go live remains to be seen, but what do you guys think of it? Is this something you want to see on Facebook?

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook