Oliver Haslam·

Twitter Is Thinking About Emoji-Based Reactions Similar To Facebook’s

Twitter appears to be considering adding a new feature that will allow people to go one step further than just liking a tweet. If the plans come to fruition, we’ll all be able to leave emoji-based reactions to tweets.

And yes, that does sound familiar – Facebook already offers the same feature.

First spotted by TechCrunch, Twitter is now running a survey that asks users what they think about the idea. “We’re exploring additional ways for people to express themselves in conversations happening on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesperson said of the survey when speaking with TechCrunch.

Specifically, Twitter’s survey proposed a few different sets of reaction emojis, all of which include the heart (like), laughing face with tears (funny), thinking face (interesting) and crying face (sad).

Things look set to go a step further than that, though. We could also see thumbs up and thumbs down, not to mention upvote and downvote arrows similar to those found on Reddit.

However, while some are concerned that such a move could cause problems including harassment, Twitter seems to be aware of that.

The survey questions demonstrated that Twitter is aware of the challenges that come with introducing emoji reactions that could imply negative sentiments. It asked the respondents how they would want to take advantage of a downvote or dislike, for example — whether they would use the reaction instead of replying to a tweet, or whether they would downvote irrelevant or offensive tweets, as well.

Twitter also told TechCrunch that it’s work on these new reactions is “exploratory” so there’s a chance these features might never see the light of day. And if they do, you can bet they won’t come to third-party clients via the Twitter API.

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