Why Facebook's 'dislike' button will be a total disaster

Just think of the trolls — and the accidents...

I'm a hater. I hate pictures of frolicking kittens, viral messages that ask you to "Press 'like' if you're against cancer!" and humble-bragging. You might think that this would make me particularly receptive to Facebook's upcoming "dislike" button, which Mark Zuckerberg announced was in the works just this week — but you'd then be wrong. In fact, I hate it. And I expect it will be a disaster.

I admit that the idea has merit. When I peruse my Facebook feed, I often find doom-filled and utterly non-"like" appropriate statuses ("Mom took a turn for the worse today"; "Exhausted! This kid just WON'T sleep."), which I want to support but can't without leaving a comment. I refuse to type a hackneyed "Unlike!" or "Where's the dislike button?" but it's hard to find the right empathetic words when friends post genuinely grim stuff. So some kind of quick and painless, one-click-covers-all — we don't know exactly the form it will take yet — would be quite handy.

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Ruth Margolis
Ruth ​Margolis is a British ​journalist living in the U.S. Her work has appeared in ​The Guardian, ​The ​Daily Telegraph and BBCAmerica.com.