Facebook has reportedly started testing its Reddit-style ‘dislike’ button in countries outside of the US.
Tweets from Australia and New Zealand show that the social network has started giving users the option to essentially downvote comments they don’t like or feel are inappropriate.
Rather than a thumbs down icon, as many had expected, Facebook has changed the way that comments are displayed to users.
Now if you see a comment that you like you can upvote it and as with Reddit, the more upvotes it gets the higher that comment will appear below the original post.
The same applies of course for downvoting so as more people downvote a comment it starts to be pushed out of the visible line of comments.
Once you downvote a comment it’ll be hidden from your account and you’ll be asked to explain why you downvoted it as either ‘offensive’, ‘misleading’ or ‘off-topic.'
Now to be clear, this is not an officially new feature from Facebook yet and so it’s technically still in the testing phase.
For the company to start testing it outside of the US however suggests that it could be close to rolling it out in more countries including the UK.
Speaking to HuffPost UK a Facebook spokesperson said: “People have told us they would like to see better public discussions on Facebook, and want spaces where people with different opinions can have more constructive dialogue. To that end, we’re running a small test in New Zealand which allows people to upvote or downvote comments on public Page posts. Our hope is that this feature will make it easier for us to create such spaces, by ranking the comments that readers believe deserve to rank highest, rather than the comments that get the strongest emotional reaction.”
Facebook originally revealed the existence of the downvote button in February 2018 when it confirmed that a small number of users in the US would be able to trial the feature on their accounts.