Does Facebook Need A Dislike Button?

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dislike-button

It looks like Facebook is considering other ways users can express their feelings beyond the Like button.

Zuckerberg said that he is thinking about it when he was asked whether the social network would ever add the long-requested dislike button. However, he quickly clarified that such a button likely wouldn’t say “dislike” on it. Instead, people often want to react to posts they see on Facebook with sentiments other than “like.”

“Everyone feels like they they can just push the Like button, and that’s an important way to sympathize or empathize with someone,” Zuckerberg told the audience. “However, there are times when you may want the simplicity of a one-click response but a “like” doesn’t feel appropriate. Facebook is thinking about ‘dislike’, but maybe not through a dislike button, ” he added. “We need to figure out the right way to do it so it ends up being a force for good, not a force for bad, since a “dislike” or other negative sentiment could easily be used for the wrong reasons.

Zuckerberg also defended Facebook’s latest controversial real names policy, which requires Facebook users to identify themselves by their legal names, saying it encourages accountability among users.

“It’s part of building a safe community,” he said. “On Facebook, most people refer to themselves by their real name and that’s a very important part of our culture.”

The goal is to make the social network a “reflection of real world relationships” and that the real name policy “grounds everyone in that reality” said Zuckerberg. He also addressed another recent controversy: Facebook’s experiments. Specifically, the highly cited emotional manipulation study that experimented with hiding various posts on users’ news feeds to see whether it would affect their mood. “Testing is a really important part of how Facebook works overall,” Zukerberg explained.

He initially defended the test saying the company thought it “had a responsibility to the community” to investigate issues that could affect the “emotional or psychological wellbeing” of users. “We could have done it a lot better,” he said.