The “like” button is one of the cornerstones of Facebook, but there’s no avoiding the fact that it simply isn’t appropriate for certain situations.
Facebook has been becoming increasingly aware of this recently. Just last month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company was preparing to roll out some sort of “dislike” button sometime in the near future.
On Thursday, Facebook took it a step further, announcing that it would be testing out a set of six new emoji icons that give users the ability to interact with posts using a much wider array of emotions.
Facebook is testing out the emojis in Spain and Ireland — if you live in one of those two countries, the new buttons should be available to you by the end of the week.
Adam Mosseri, a product director at Facebook who oversees the site’s newsfeed, said that the company will use the data gathered from this test run to re-evaluate and refine the feature before making it available to all of Facebook’s 1.5 billion users.
“How do people use it? Is this the right set of reactions?”
he said in an interview with The New York Times.
According to Mosseri, the emojis were selected by analyzing which stickers people use most often in the comment section of posts.
“We tried the find the ones that are most universally used,”
he said.
Unfortunately, there is no word yet on when the feature will be universally available.
Read more from The New York Times.