In April, it added a seventh emoji reaction, “care,” which could be especially useful during the coronavirus pandemic.Used mostly to express extreme unhappiness or disappointment, the Angry Face With Horns emoji □ gets the point across pretty quickly. “The caution is indeed about imposing judgement on different emotions’ values,” the second researcher wrote.īut on another front, Facebook was coming around to the idea that users didn’t have enough emotional options for their reactions. When a researcher on a message board asked why, another responded that there were strong arguments on both sides but that “the voice of caution won out” pending further study. The company declined to comment on Zuckerberg’s old remark this week, and over the years, Facebook has generally not commented on the emoji reactions except to announce new emojis and to respond to Haugen’s disclosures this week.īy January 2020, documents show, Facebook had decided that the emojis overall should get less weight in the ranking algorithm, but the weight for each remained equal. It’s not clear from Zuckerberg’s years-old remark whether he was being sincere, flippant or something else. When a Facebook user urged the company to create a “dislike” button, Zuckerberg responded in a public comment on the site, “You can use the angry face.”īut the researcher wrote in a December 2019 report that the angry face was, in fact, the opposite of a “dislike” button, because it could deliver more of the same: “Indeed, even Mark himself has suggested that the anger reaction is a reasonable way to express that you don’t like a piece of content, even as we currently count it as 4x as important as a less ambiguous ‘like’ for giving you more such content.” “We find that angrys, hahas, wows seem more frequent on civic low quality news, civic misinfo, civic toxicity, health misinfo, and health antivax content, than on other civic and health content,” a study said that month.Īt least one researcher expressed concern that even CEO Mark Zuckerberg might not understand what the “angry” emoji meant. Not all emojis were created equal, it turned out, and employees began thinking they should change the reaction weights so they weren’t all the same. The system gave equal weight to the five emoji reactions, and that was true regardless of the context or the intention of the person reacting, so a conspiracy theory with a lot of “haha” reactions or a violent image with a lot of “angry” reactions would potentially get an extra boost from the algorithm.īy November 2019, more research had come in, and it wasn’t looking good. The emojis took on renewed importance two years later when Facebook announced a new ranking system to determine which posts people saw and in which order. Nextdoor also has reaction emojis.įacebook’s emoji saga began in February 2016 when the company redesigned the “like” button to include five more ways to react to a post: “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad” and “angry.” (Yet another emoji reaction, “yay,” was considered but didn’t make the cut.) A designer behind Facebook’s “like” button has since expressed misgivings, and Instagram now allows users to hide their like counts. Twitter has tried different approaches for its “like” button, which predated Facebook’s. Reddit has had “upvotes” and “downvotes” since its earliest days in 2005. For years, online social media companies have struggled with how to design buttons that don’t encourage toxic behavior or whether to have them at all. Reaction buttons are important beyond Facebook. While the documents aren’t exhaustive, the ones that have been released illustrate the evolution of one of Facebook’s most important tools - its ranking algorithm - through the words of its own employees. The story also demonstrates how complex Facebook has become, both as a social media app and as a corporation with a large research staff.ĭocuments describing the study of emoji reactions were included in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress by legal counsel for Frances Haugen, who worked as a Facebook product manager until May and has come forward as a whistleblower. It’s capable of using even small software tweaks to dramatically change what people see online and is persistent in testing the resulting impact. The story of Facebook’s emoji reactions illustrates how the company has come to operate - sometimes at breakneck pace and other times with caution. But it took years for Facebook to realize how right the person was, and when it did, it changed course. It turned out that the first employee’s concern was prescient and that the angry cartoon faces would have more influence on Facebook’s billions of users than others expected, company documents show.
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