Facebook confirms it is testing a “downvote” button to flag bad comments
How can Facebook improve user engagement? Perhaps the best solution they can come up with is to allow people to dislike comments that are inappropriate, inflammatory, or misleading. However, Facebook doesn’t call this a “dislike” and instead uses the word “downvote.”
According to TechCrunch, the world's largest social network is testing an interactive "downvote" button on a limited number of Pages. A Facebook spokesperson said: "We don't use the dislike button. We are exploring a feature that allows users to directly comment on comments on any Page's posts. This feature is currently only being tested on a small group in the US."
Here is an image of the aforementioned "downvote" button:
Facebook says the downvote button will give users a simple and easy way to notify Facebook of inappropriate, uncivil, or misleading comments. When pressed, the comment will be hidden and users can choose to submit a number of comments about it, such as "Offensie," "Misleading," and "Off Topic." From there, Facebook will be able to tell if the comment is objectionable, spreading fake news, or simply unrelated to the article, but it often gets buried under dozens of other comments instead of being immediately visible. Here's what the feature looks like in action:
Additionally, this feature does not lower the rating of the Page, comment, or post. It only notifies Facebook, not the commenter.
Not the dislike button
The dislike button was a much-anticipated feature on Facebook, but Facebook announced that it would never bring it to users. Instead, they built a Reactions system that allows you to express your feelings about posts or comments, including "love", "wow", "haha", "sad" and "angry".
The feature is also built into Messenger, and there's even a thumbs-up and thumbs-down icon to express agreement or disagreement.
The “downvote” button is the closest thing to a dislike. Downvotes have long been used on the news social network Reddit to rank comments. The button is said to be part of Facebook’s effort to add more “humanity” to the social network, by prioritizing content that can lead to meaningful interactions rather than passive reading and swiping.
In addition, Facebook also showed fewer engaging videos, causing them to lose more than 700,000 daily users in the US and Canada - the first decline in Facebook's history.
But one way Facebook could increase engagement even more without spending time is to make sure the most interesting comments appear at the top of posts. Facebook already ranks comments based on the number of Likes and replies. A “downvote” button would ensure that if a comment is suspected of climbing the rankings, Facebook would know immediately.
Overall, the "downvote" button will help Facebook remove bad comments, but it also makes moderation more difficult, and what criteria will they have to evaluate a comment as invalid, when they themselves are having difficulty fulfilling their responsibilities to users?
