Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made headlines this morning with the revelation that Facebook was finally designing, and soon implementing, a “dislike” button. Except that’s not what they’re doing, at all.

As Zuckerberg explained in a public Q&A, he was apprehensive to simply provide an option for users to flag content (similar to Reddit’s upvote/downvote system), and instead wanted to provide the Facebook community with a way to signify empathy – “That’s not the kind of community we want to create”.

An option for users to “dislike” content posted by others on Facebook has long been desired by many. Facebook currently offers a “recommend” button for third party sites which still provides users the option to “like” unfortunate or tragic news stories. Watch Mark Zuckerberg explain the concept of the “empathy” button in the video above.

Kyle Setch

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