At the moment, the feature is being offered in a small number of public page posts seen by a limited group.
A new Facebook downvote feature is currently undergoing testing by the social media giant. The goal is to make it possible for users to “downvote” comments.
The testing is only in its initial stages so the vast majority of users and pages won’t see the feature yet.
So far, the Facebook downvote button is limited to a few handfuls of Public page post comments and can be seen exclusively by a tiny set of users exclusively in the United States. In fact, the downvoting option is available for only 5 percent of Android users who are in the U.S. and whose language preference is set to English. This feature is not added to any Groups posts and is not available on public figure Pages.
According to the social network giant, it is looking into downvoting in order to simplify the process for users to indicate that a comment is “inappropriate, uncivil, or misleading.” Moreover the company indicated that downvoting and “disliking” are not the same thing and the features should not be used in the same way. The new option is meant to provide Facebook itself with responses and feedback regarding comments on public Pages and won’t display a user’s dislike for a certain statement to his or her Facebook friends.
The Facebook downvote feature will be designed to make its purpose very clear to users.
Once the downvote button has been tapped, the user is asked whether the reason they are downvoting the comment is because it is “offensive,” “misleading,” or “off topic.”
The test for this feature is intended to be a short term one and will not have any impact on the comment’s ranking nor that of the Page or the affected post. Moreover, the feature does not and will not display the number of downvotes a certain comment has received.
It is not meant to be viewed in the same way that certain other social networks have used downvoting systems, such as the one on Reddit. Instead, this option is designed to allow Facebook to collect feedback to be used internally.
The social network already offers a “hide” button meant to make it possible for users to make comments they don’t like invisible to them. However, that feature is not as intuitive as the new Facebook downvote system is designed to be. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has previously stated that the company doesn’t have any intentions to add a system that will let users vote posts up or down.