By Geraldine Satre Buisson
‘We’ve been listening to people and know that there should be more ways to easily and quickly express how something you see in the News Feed makes you feel.’
On February 24, Facebook’s iconic “Like” button spawned six offspring: “Love”, “Haha”, “Wow”, “Sad” and “Angry”:
The Internet waited no time to respond in its usual deprecating fashion. The Oatmeal, for example, found the new options too limited and proposed a further extension.
At first glance, the argument that the goal of this upgrade is to improve user experience makes a lot of sense. The “Like” button was introduced in 2009. Since then, it has come to mean a great deal more than “I like this”, and that can lead to some confusion. To Like a couple’s engagement announcement means “congratulations”. To Like an article from The Guardian about Donald Trump failing to condemn white supremacists means “the Republican presidential campaign is scaring me.” To Like the video of cats being afraid of cucumbers means “this is hilarious,” and “I should try this with my own cat,” and “who thought to put a cucumber behind a cat in the first place?”
Because Liking something is the fastest shortcut to expressing a reaction, it is essentially being used to give exposure to some content – whether the person actually feels positive about its message or not. And this exposure-giving tool is crucial to Facebook in several ways.
Ninety-five percent of Facebook’s revenues come from advertising, totalling $17b in 2015. Part of this comes in selling advertising space—the right for an ad to appear on the right-hand side of the user’s homepage or directly in their News Feed. It is therefore in the company’s interest to have the greatest number of people spending the maximum amount of time on its platform. In the industry, this is called “maximizing eyeball hang time”. The “Like” button is a great indicator to figure out what kind of content people like best in general, and therefore what kind of content will make us stay on the site longer. They noticed in 2013 that videos seemed to capture people’s attention more effectively than written articles. Since then, videos on your News Feed start automatically.
But pressing “Like” is also, of course, an indicator of what kind of content you specifically enjoy. Facebook is able to sell its advertising space at such a high price because it can deliver to marketers an unparalleled level of detail about the demographics they may want to target (e.g., men over 30 who enjoy watching online sports on a Sunday afternoon, students in the London area who are going to the Field Day Festival and also like hummus). It is actually possible for users to see the advertising categories under which they fall based on their behaviour on the site. According to the site, the author likes truth-telling, shape-shifting, rainbow-riding moose.*
The “Like” button, then, can be used as a tool to categorise users at ever-increasing levels of detail. Gerlitz and Helmond call this model the Like economy:
‘Facebook uses a rhetoric of sociality and connectivity to create an infrastructure in which social interactivity and user affects are instantly turned into valuable consumer data and enter multiple cycles of multiplication and exchange.’
(Gerlitz, C. and A. Helmond, 2013. The Like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web. New Media & Society, p.2)
Enter this new set of Facebook Reactions. Having seven “emotions” to choose from is useful for users to help them express the difference between “Sorry for your loss” and “I want this cake in my mouth right now”. But most importantly, it is useful for Facebook. It opens up seven new opportunities for the company to gather ever more detailed data about how we feel and to act on and monetize that data at will.
‘Over time,’ product manager Sammi Krug stated, ‘we hope to learn how the different Reactions should be weighted differently to do a better job of showing everyone the stories they most want to see.’ How exactly these weights will be defined remains to be seen. But it isn’t hard to imagine that, in the interest of making users want to spend more time on the platform, “Love”, “Haha” and “Wow” may be preferred to “Sad” or “Angry”. If this means more cats and cucumbers, and less Trump and Ku Klux Klan, we’ll all be blissfully happier. Right?
*If someone can tell her where to purchase one, she is all ears.
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