Facebook is testing a ‘downvote’ button, here’s what it means

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on multiple occasions has confirmed that the social media website won't ever bring a 'dislike' button. One of the reasons given by the CEO was that it may increase the rate of online bullying. So although the firm cannot have a 'dislike' button per se, at least it can have the feature in disguise. Being called as 'Downvote', the new button was spotted being tested with limited users.
The new 'Downvote' button was seen in certain comments inside some posts by public pages. For now it is being tested in the US only. As mentioned by the company spokesperson to TechCrunch, the idea behind this new feature is to signal the social media firm about a comment that is inappropriate, uncivil or misleading. "We are not testing a dislike button. We are exploring a feature for people to give us feedback about comments on public page posts.
This is running for a small set of people in the U.S. only," said the spokesperson to the tech news website. The 'Downvote' button doesn't have a dedicated icon for now as it is simply seen as an option under each comment, as seen in the screenshots. When a user clicks on the particular button, Facebook asks you the reason for it. These include - Offensive, Misleading and Off Topic. These come in addition to the 'Hide' button, which already exists for each comment on pages.
Facebook has said that this is a test for limited time period and it won't affect the ranking of the posts in any way. There won't be a public display of the count on how many times a comment has been downvoted. As for the dislike button, Zuckerberg back in 2015, said in a Q&A session that "We didn't want to just build a Dislike button 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 we want to create."