Facebook Launches New Way to React to Posts

Photo provided by Wikipedia Commons

Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2016, Facebook released a new interactive media to the website called “Reactions,” which gives the average user more options to respond than simply liking a post. This comes from a response to users wanting a different option than simply ‘liking’ a post, with the specific example of wanting a ‘dislike’ button. While Facebook still has yet to provide a dislike button, the new way of liking provides several different emotions: ‘love’, ‘haha’, ‘wow’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’, as well as still keeping the tradition ‘like’. Each reaction comes with a corresponding emoji.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder, made the official announcement, stating, “Our community has been asking for a dislike button for years, but not because people want to tell friends they don’t like their posts. People wanted to express empathy and make it comfortable to share a wider range of emotions. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the right way to do this with our team. One of my goals was to make it as simple as pressing and holding the Like button. The result is Reactions, which allow you to express love, laughter, surprise, sadness or anger.”

Zuckerberg mentions that the ‘love’ reaction is the most popular so far, but we will have to wait and see how this overall change affects the Facebook community.