As teased last year by Twitter’s Chief Product Officer, Kayvon Beykpour, the social network has for a while been “exploring” the idea of adding a dislike button to the platform to engage users more on the varying opinions and posts shared online. While replying to a critique of Twitter’s development priorities from Jackie Singh, a cybersecurity expert for the Joe Biden campaign, Beykpour insisted that Twitter prioritizes addressing issues like “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” “harassment,” and “Disinformation.”
He even went ahead and replied to her tweet that suggested Twitter should “Add dislike button or downvote capability,” Beykpour wrote, “this is something we’re exploring.” It now seems like this is nearly coming to fruition.
In a message visible to some iOS users, Twitter said dislikes “aren’t public or visible to the author, while Likes are.”
As a confirmation of this, the platform’s support team issued a statement.
It looks like the feature is still in the early testing phases and could be further redesigned or decided on to go public for everyone to use.
From the looks of it at the moment, the dislike button is only visible to the person who is viewing tweets, and not to the author of the tweet. The thumbs down option will allow a tweet reply to be downvoted.
Once more information on this comes out, we’ll be sure to keep you covered. For now, let us know what you think of the new feature in the comments below.