Facebook testing a 'downvote' button, aims to stop hate comments
Facebook, one of the most used social media websites today, tests the "downvote" button to be used for the comment section.
In the past few weeks, screenshots and various threads of conversations have been circulating on Twitter about the 'downvote' button.
This button is currently being tested on some public pages. The main goal of this button is for Facebook to receive signals on problematic and insensitive comments. This will help the company to immediately take action to put down or report the specific posts.
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If the button is pressed, the content of the comment will be hidden, and the context of the action is requested by making the user choose whether the comment is "offensive," "misleading," or "off topic."
A statement from Facebook was released, and it stated, "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."
A dislike button has long been requested as a Facebook feature, but Facebook has never given it. From a public question-answer portion last 2015 with Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, the reason as to why the request of the dislike button will not be considered because the CEO did not want it to turn into a "forum."
"We didn't want to just build a Dislike button because we don't want to turn Facebook 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," said Zuckerberg in the Q&A, as obtained by TechCrunch.
Facebook made it clear that the downvote button is not a dislike button. This is just an initiative by the Facebook company to avoid inappropriate, misleading, and uncivil comments. This may also be related to the "hate threads" that are usually present in political topics. The prevention of the spread of fake news may also benefit from this downvote feature.
