Facebook has introduced a limited test of a “downvote” button, allowing a small percentage of U.S. users to flag comments they find problematic on public pages.
The social media giant emphasizes that this is not the long-requested “dislike” button that many users have wanted since the introduction of the “like” button in 2009. “We are not testing a dislike button. We are exploring a feature for people to give us feedback about comments on public page posts,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “This is running for a small set of people in the U.S. only.”
The test appears on comment sections of public Page posts for approximately 5% of English-speaking Android users in the United States. When a user clicks the downvote button, the selected comment becomes hidden from their view, and they are prompted to categorize why they found it objectionable – with options including “offensive,” “misleading,” or “off-topic.”
Unlike Reddit’s well-known upvote and downvote system, Facebook’s implementation serves a different purpose. The feedback is only accessible to Facebook’s employees and there are no publicly viewable downvote counters. The number of downvotes does not affect the comment’s ranking in the feed. This distinction reinforces Facebook’s stance that the feature is meant as feedback for the platform rather than for the commenter.
This test arrives as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s broader initiative to improve user experience on the platform. The motivation behind the downvote button is to create a “lightweight way for people to provide a signal to Facebook that a comment is inappropriate, uncivil, or misleading.”
The decision to test a downvote option instead of implementing a dislike button aligns with Facebook’s longstanding position. In 2014, during a public Q&A session, Zuckerberg expressed concerns about negative voting mechanisms: “I don’t think there needs to be a voting mechanism on Facebook about whether posts are good or bad. I don’t think that’s socially very valuable or good for the community.”
In 2016, instead of introducing a dislike button, Facebook expanded its emotional reactions to include love, wow, haha, sad, and angry emoji. These options were designed to provide more nuanced responses than a simple binary like/dislike system.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian acknowledged the similarity to his platform’s signature feature in a tweet, saying “Sincerest form of flattery! Wish I’d trademarked it and ‘upvote’ when came up with it.”
It remains unclear whether Facebook plans to roll out the downvote feature more broadly after the test concludes. The company has not announced any timeline for potential expansion of the feature to other markets or user groups.
For now, most Facebook users will continue to rely on the existing reactions system, while the company evaluates whether the downvote mechanism effectively improves comment quality on public pages.