Facebook are said to be on the verge of launching a dislike button, with founder Mark Zuckerberg announcing that he is “thinking about” ways to implement such a feature. Zuckerberg told attendees of a Q&A session in California that it was one of the social network’s most-requested features.
Zuckerberg expressed worries that such a feature might demean posts. 4.5 billion ‘likes’ are generated each day. Zuckerberg said “One of things we’ve thought about for quite a while is what’s the right way to make it so that people can easily express a broader range of emotions. A lot of times people share things on Facebook that are sad moments in their lives. Often people tell us that they don’t feel comfortable pressing ‘like’ because ‘like’ isn’t the appropriate sentiment.”
The company has been working hard on clamping down on fake likes and users. It has been accused of using ‘likes’ to collect data on users’ browsing habits, and faced criticism due to the way that the popularity of brands and content can be increased artificially. There have been a number of “like-farming” cases over the years, with individuals and companies artificially enhancing the amount of ‘likes’ given to a post or page in order to sell pages on for sizeable sums.
Fake pages have been launched by people imitating various companies in order to increase their monetary value. Experts claim that companies are worried about what the effects of a ‘dislike’ button could be, especially if thousands of ‘dislikes’ could be artificially generated by others.
Do you think a ‘dislike’ button would be good for Facebook and its users or would it be too open to abuse? Tell us in the comments section below.