Social media giant Facebook will soon introduce a button that will allow users to express empathy with status updates, as 'liking' is not always appropriate.
"I think people have asked about the dislike button for many years. Today is a special day because today is the day I can say we're working on it and shipping a test of it," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a Q&A session streamed live from Facebook's headquarters, broadcast on the social network yesterday.
"It's important to give people more options than just 'like' to help express empathy and sympathy. Not every moment is a good moment," said the CEO. He used the Syrian refugee children as an example of when 'liking' is inappropriate.
Zuckerberg said the company is ready to start testing the feature, and depending on how that goes, it will then be rolled out to more users, in phases, by region.
He said the company was reluctant in the past to introduce such a button for fear of Facebook turning into a forum where people are 'up-voting' and 'down-voting' other people's comment, similar to Reddit.
It was not confirmed when the button will be available, what it will look like, or how it will work.
Zuckerberg answered other questions related to Facebook as a platform for education, virtual reality, his optimism about artificial intelligence to do good, consideration of trigger warnings, and medical research.
The full hour-long stream is available to watch on Zuckerberg's Facebook page.
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