TikTok announced today that it is testing a feature that will allow users to dislike individual comments on videos. According to a blog post on safety and community guidelines enforcement, the feature will allow individuals to flag comments they find irrelevant or inappropriate without the dislike being visible to other users.
Once a user dislikes a comment, the dislike won’t be public and even commenters won’t be notified that their comment has been disliked. In addition, commenters and other users won’t be able to see how many times a certain comment has been disliked.
It seems that the platform has been working on the dislike button for quite some time now. Earlier this year, a social media consultant Matt Navarra first spotted the feature.
TikTok is testing a ‘Dislike’ button for comments pic.twitter.com/Pv8anV5fDh
— Matt Navarra – Exiting X… Follow me on Threads (@MattNavarra) January 27, 2022
Commenting on this upgrade, TikTok said:
This community feedback will add to the range of factors we already use to help keep the comment section consistently relevant and a place for genuine engagement.
Currently, TikTok users can dislike videos to show their lack of interest in a specific type of content. However, the comment dislike button appears to be available next to the report button for violations. As of now, the new feature is currently being tested in selected regions, excluding the United States.
TikTok will not be the first platform to have such a feature. Variations of dislike buttons are available on several other social platforms as well. For example, YouTube offers a thumbs down button for comments, but the dislike count is private.
Reddit offers a similar downvote button for comments, with the total tallies for upvotes and downvotes being public. In addition, Twitter has also been testing a private downvote button for replies to tweets.
