Culture

Facebook’s Finally Introducing A Dislike Button; Anarchy Looms

These are the end times.

by Alex McKinnon  16 September 2015

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Facebook’s always been a delicate balancing act between posts from friends and pages you care about, infuriating statuses from people from high school you can’t work up the guts to delete, and hiding from your parents. Now that balancing act’s about to become a goddamn minefield, as Facebook gears up to introduce the architect of our collective destruction: the Dislike button.

In a Q&A session at Facebook headquarters yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook’s finally giving you the ability to dislike stuff.

“I think people have asked about the Dislike button for many years,” Zuckerberg said. “Today is a special day because today is the day I can say we’re working on it and shipping it.”

Zuckerberg said the feature, which people have been jonesing for for years despite resistance from the company, would primarily be designed as a way for people to express empathy with a post, rather than antipathy towards it. “What people really want is the ability to express empathy. Not every moment is a good moment.”

Facebook’s dragged its feet on a Dislike button for a long time, mainly out of fears adding one would turn the site into a Redditlike hellscape that encourages people to shit all over things they don’t like. “That isn’t what we’re here to build in the world,” Zuckerberg said.

Regardless of what Zuckerberg thinks people are going to use it for, Facebook’s about to get a whole lot more confrontational.