One for the haters: Twitter considers adding a dislike button

Over the years there have been two missing components everyone on Twitter moans about: the notorious edit option and the dislike button. Well, it turns out we might be getting one of those in the future.

Responding to a tweet from security expert Jackie Singh, Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour revealed the company is “exploring” adding a dislike button to its platform — but it’s simply not one of its most urgent priorities.

#1, 2 and 4 are literally our top priority (making the public conversation on Twitter) and has been for years. We’ve made a lot of progress but still lots to do. We do feel it’s important to solve other problems too! As for #3, this is something we’re exploring.

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) November 17, 2020

Instead, Twitter is currently concentrating its efforts on cutting the spread of inauthentic behavior, enhancing the safety of its users with better tools to curb and report harassment, and cracking down on misinformation that could have harmful effects on its users.

Anyone who actively uses Twitter already knows the company has spent a considerable amount of time on battling harassment and the spread of misinformation on its platform. Indeed, it has introduced a slew of features aimed at solving those two issues over the years.

More recently, the company shared it had labeled over 300,000 tweets for election misinformation, some of which were posted by none other than US President Donald Trump.

To be fair, Twitter has previously experimented with the idea of a dislike button, although not quite in the same way its “like” button works.

The company had briefly made it possible for users to report tweets they don’t like, but it was impossible for other users to see a tally of the dislikes a tweet had received. It’s unclear if Twitter is exploring any alternatives beyond this, but time will tell.

Until then, you’ll simply have to do with the good old ratio.

via Gizmodo