Twitter Expands Downvote Button Test Worldwide

Twitter is globally expanding its testing of a new "dislike" or thumbs down button for tweets, which is designed to let people downvote replies on the social media platform.

The company announced the global expansion of the test on Thursday, saying it had "learned a lot" about the downvoting option in its initial limited testing:

We learned a lot about the types of replies you don't find relevant and we're expanding this test –– more of you on web and soon iOS and Android will have the option to use reply downvoting.

Twitter says early tests showed the reason most users clicked the down arrow was because the reply was perceived as offensive, or because they perceived it as not relevant, or both. Twitter also said those testing the feature agree that "it improves the quality of the conversations on Twitter."

It's worth noting that the dislike button is only visible to the person who is viewing tweets – it is not a publicly available metric or visible to the author of the tweet. Twitter says that it is an internal tool that is designed to help Twitter understand what people think is valuable to a conversation.