How can Facebook promote meaningful interaction between users? By letting them downvote inappropriate comments to hide them. Facebook is now testing a downvote button on a limited set of public Page post comment reels, the company confirms to TechCrunch. But what it does with signals about problematic comments could raise new questions about censorship, and its role as a news editor and media company.
A Facebook spokesperson tells that the motivation behind the downvote button is to create a lightweight way for people to provide a signal to it that a comment is inappropriate, uncivil, or misleading.
Here’s the statement Facebook provided: “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.”
When tapped, the downvote button hides a comment, and gives users additional reporting options like “Offensive”, “Misleading”, and “Off Topic”. Those could help it figure out if the comment is objectionable, a form of “fake news”, or just irrelevant. Facebook already has a “Hide” button for comments, but it’s usually hidden behind the drop-down arrow on comments rather than immediately clickable.
According to Facebook, this is a short-term test that doesn’t affect the ranking of the comment, post, or Page. It’s designed as a way to give feedback , not the commenter, and there will be no publicly visible count of how many downvotes a comment gets. The test is running for 5% of Android users in the U.S. with language set to English. The downvote button only appears on public Page posts, not on posts by Groups, public figures or users. There’s currently no plan to expand the test as is.
Not A Dislike Button
A dislike button has long been the most requested Facebook feature, but Facebook has never given in.
Back in 2015, CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to a Q&A question about it, saying:
“We didn’t want to just build a Dislike button because we don’t want to turn it into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts. That doesn’t seem like the kind of community we want to create.”
Instead, Facebook built the Reactions options that let you respond to posts and comments with love, wow, haha, sad or angry emoji and also built reactions into Messenger with the option to give messages a thumbs-up or thumbs-down so you could show agreement or disagreement.
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