This post has been corrected.
After months of teasing, Facebook is finally adding new emoji reactions to supplement its ubiquitous ālikeā button. The company said today (Feb. 24) that itās making fiveĀ reactions in addition to ālikeā available to users globally.
The new reactions are: š Love, š Haha, š® Wow, š„ Sad, and š” Angry.
Users can access them by hovering over the ālikeā button in a desktop browser or holding down the ālikeā button onĀ mobile.
For years, Facebook users have badgered the social network for a ādislikeā button. Though Facebook fell short of giving them thatāworrying it would be too negativeāthe company decided instead on six playful emoji buttons: š,š,š,š®,š„, and š” back in October 2015, when it launched a pilot of theĀ new feature. It looks like theĀ āyayā reaction š didnāt make theĀ cut for the global release.
The new reactions will have an impact onĀ the Facebookās news feed, which guesses whatĀ content aĀ user wants to see based on ālikes,āĀ according toĀ a blog post from Sammi Krug,Ā who manages the feature. Initially, all reactions will have the same weight as a ālike,ā but over time, the different emojis will be factored differentlyĀ and shapeĀ what appears in a userās news feed.
Facebook has known for a while that people often donāt mean it when they hit the ālikeā button. The companyĀ admitted last year that many users impulsively hit the button to further a connection with the poster, not necessarily because they agree with the content. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said many times in the past that ālikeā isnāt an appropriate reaction to a somber status update or news story about tragedy.
Zuckerberg revealed to investors last monthĀ a key motivation for Facebookās change: He was worried users would stop sharing content.Ā This would meanĀ less user-engagement, and fewer ads seen.
āIf you share a sad piece of content or something that makes you angry, people may not have the tool to react to it,ā he said. āAnd therefore, over time the community feels less comfortable sharing that content on Facebook. We want people to be able to share all of the things that are meaningful to them, not just the things that are happy and that people are going to ālikeā when they see it.ā
Correction: A previous version of this post statedĀ that only positive reactions will factor into Facebookās news feed algorithm.