Twitter is now offering downvote button globally

Twitter update: The downvote button, which was previously available to a select group of users, is being expanded to a global audience.

Have you seen a new downvote button on Twitter, which turns orange when you click on it? Well, you are not alone. Twitter has started rolling out the downvote feature globally, so it should now be visible to everyone.

The feature, which was previously available to a select group of users, is being expanded to a global audience. The company says that so far, this experimental feature has given positive feedback and helped them understand the content people want to see on this platform. Twitter first started testing downvotes in 2021 with web users, and the microblogging site is now planning to release the same for iOS and Android users too.

Initially, Twitter displayed different versions of downvoting. It offered both upvote and downvote buttons to check which one is mostly preferred by users for what content. Some of the testers were also shown thumbs up and thumbs down buttons.

The experiment revealed that most of the people used the downvote button when they found a tweet offensive or irrelevant. “This experiment also revealed that downvoting is the most frequently used way for people to flag content they don’t want to see,” Twitter said.

However, Twitter has confirmed that it will not display downvote counts on tweets and the data will be used by the platform to improve users’ experience. YouTube also took a similar initiative recently and started hiding public dislike counts on videos across its site to prevent dislike attacks or harassment for smaller creators. The company said that this will promote “respectful interactions between viewers and creators.”

Twitter says the downvote button “improves the quality of conversations on Twitter,” which is why it is expanding it to a wider set of audience. This also suggests that the social media giant might eventually offer this as a permanent feature to users.

Other popular social media platforms like Instagram don’t offer a dislike or downvote button. The platform gives you an option to hide Like counts as well as comments. Facebook did test the downvote feature back in 2018, but the company didn’t make it permanent. Those who use Reddit do have the option to upvote or downvote any content on the platform.