Social media platform Twitter has expanded the testing of its downvote button worldwide, making it available for all users both on Android and iOS platforms. The new button should allow users to flag tweets they don't like.
We've been testing how we can surface the most relevant replies within Tweets with the use of downvoting on replies. As we're expanding the experiment to a global audience, we want to share a little about what we have learned thus far!
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) February 3, 2022
👇 https://t.co/wM0CpwRgo6
The company started testing the feature on a limited number of users last year to better understand the needs of users regarding the content they want or do not want to see. Thus, the feature will allow Twitter to personalize the display of replies, as each user will be able to downvote replies they don't want to see.
Some of you on iOS may see different options to up or down vote on replies. We're testing this to understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 21, 2021
Your downvotes aren’t public, while your upvotes will be shown as likes. pic.twitter.com/hrBfrKQdcY
During the previous round of testing, the company found that users generally downvote replies that are offensive or irrelevant. The same experiment also showed that downgrading is most often used to label content that users don't want to see.
Bradley Rhodes
It should be noted that the number of downvotes a reply gets will not be publicly visible – the button will only be visible to the person viewing the replies.