Facebook testing downvote button for comments

Facebook is trying out a voting system for public posts which would allow users to “downvote” comments.

After trialling the upvote/downvote buttons on a handful of users earlier this year, “the company has made the feature widely available in Australia and New Zealand for the time being, in what appears to be some sort of advanced-stage test”, BGR reports.

Antipodean Facebook users appeared baffled by the changes:

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The new feature displays up and down arrows beside each comment on public posts. “The more upvotes it gets the higher that comment will appear below the original post,” says HuffPost.

Conversely, users would have to scroll down to see “downvoted” comments.

In a statement, Facebook said that the downvote function should not be seen as a “dislike” counterpart to the site’s existing “like” button.

“People have told us they would like to see better public discussions on Facebook, and want spaces where people with different opinions can have more constructive dialogue,” they said.

“Our hope is that this feature will make it easier for us to create such spaces, by ranking the comments that readers believe deserve to rank highest, rather than the comments that get the strongest emotional reaction.”

In theory, the change will allow users more power to police the site’s content by promoting helpful or constructive input while making irrelevant or offensive comments harder to find. However, the reality may turn out quite differently.

Message board Reddit has long offered users a downvote button, intended to serve a similar role as a winnower of irrelevant or unhelpful content, but users frequently complain that the tool is more often used to express disagreement and silence dissenting opinions.