Facebook is adding Reaction emojis to the Like button

Mark Zuckerberg has made it abundantly clear that, despite numerous requests, Facebook will never implement a Dislike button. He did, however, hint that the company has been working on an update to the Like button that will expand the number of ways you can respond to people’s posts, and that update entered the testing phase this morning. It’s currently limited to users in Ireland and Spain, but from what we can tell, the Like button is accompanied by six Reaction emojis: Love, Haha, Yay, Wow, Sad, and Angry. 

In September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made some waves when he hinted Facebook was working on a way to expand its famous Like button — not by adding the much-fabled “dislike” option, but by making it way more empathetic, expressing sadness and other emotions. Today, Facebook is taking the wraps off what form the new Like may take. It is rolling out “Reactions,” a new set of six emoji that will sit alongside the original thumbs-up to let users quickly respond with love, laughter, happiness, shock, sadness and anger. Facebook tells us that the pop-up feature will first start out as a test in two markets only, Spain and Ireland, before it decides whether to tweak it and/or how to roll it out further. Having more reactive set of emoji might sound familiar to you. In the wake of reports that Facebook was working on a “dislike” button in September, our resident Facebook whisperer Josh Constine suggested that Facebook might instead work on a small selection of emoji to convey a more nuanced set of responses. It turned out that Facebook had even filed a patent for how such an emoji response feature might work and look.