THE DAYS OF commenting “dislike” on a Facebook status are over.

The social media giant is working on a dislike button which will allow users show empathy with sad posts.

“We’ve finally heard you,” CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg told a public town hall meeting in Facebook’s headquarters.

A question submitted online by a user asked the oft-repeated question of why there were no buttons along the lines of “I’m sorry”, “interesting” or “dislike” in addition to the classic thumbs-up “like” button.

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

“It took us a while to get here because we don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts. That doesn’t seem like the kind of community that we want to create.”

Zuckerberg said that it was “awkward” to like sad posts such as deaths or sad news so he wanted to find a better way for users to show that “they understand and relate to you”.

“But we have an idea that we think we’re getting ready to test soon, and depending on how that goes, we’ll roll it out more broadly.”

With reporting from AFP

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