Zuckerberg says Facebook will add ‘dislike’ button

Social media site Facebook has announced introducing a ‘dislike’ button.

That finally meets user requests, as old as 2009, when the  ‘like’ button was introduced. 

"People have asked for the 'dislike' button for many years," Mark Zuckerberg told the audience at a TuesdayQ+A session at their headquarters in Menlo Park, California, reports BBC.

"Probably hundreds of people have asked for this, and today is a special day because today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it,”

The news media also quoted the Facebook founder  as saying they were “very close” to having it ready for user testing.

In the second quarter of 2015, Facebook had 1.49 billion monthly active users.

Zuckerberg also pointed out that they do not want the button to be a way for people to “down vote” posts by others, but rather be for times when clicking "like" on "sad" posts felt insensitive, BBC said.

It also quoted Andrea Forte, an expert in social and participatory media at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, as saying users are not likely to suddenly turn on each other's posts.

In an email to BBC, she wrote: "They may use a dislike button to express some negative emotions (like frustration with ads popping up in their feeds) but I doubt it will cause them to start wantonly disliking pictures of their friends' babies, dogs, cats and cooking experiments.

"I suspect it will mainly be used to express mild disapproval, or to express solidarity when someone posts about a negative event like a death or a loss."