Facebook Is Testing Its “Dislike” Button, But It’s Not What You Thought

Update: On February 24th, Facebook announced rolled out the six new emoji reactions globally. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed last month that the social network was finally, finally working on a "Dislike" button. Well, the feature is now being tested across the site, but it may not look quite how you expected. Facebook's "Dislike" is actually a set of six emoji that let you express a range of emotions on a news feed post. You can give a traditional thumbs-up "Like," a heart to show you "love" that post, a laughing "haha" face, a smiling "yay" face, an open-mouthed "wow" smiley, a sad face, and a reddened angry face. There actually isn't a "Dislike" button at all. Adam Mosseri, News Feed's product manager, said that Facebook studied which comments and reactions were most commonly expressed on the platform and went with those options for this initial trial. In addition to using these emoji reactions on posts, you'll be able to use them on ads in your feed, so Facebook gets better feedback about ads you like versus ones that piss you off. With so many new ways to express your reaction to a news feed post, it's almost overwhelming. And this may only be the tip of the iceberg: Mosseri said that Facebook is open to adding even more emotions later on. For now, only users in Ireland and Spain will get to try out these multi-faceted emoji reactions (if that's you, we'd love to see screenshots of how this plays out on your news feed; shoot me an email at christina.bonnington at refinery29.com). Facebook is still tweaking and ironing out the feature before it goes live to a broader audience — sorry, U.S. folks. In the meantime, I guess we'll just have to keep awkwardly liking sad posts on Facebook the way we always have.