A dislike button might be coming to X really soon, despite multiple attempts to launch the feature over the past decade.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk introduced a dislike button to help stop spam bot attacks. For the time being, the button is only available to the site's verified accounts and subscribers.
Nikita Bier, the company’s Head of Product, showed how the feature works in a screen recording he posted online.
First, Bier shared a post that said, "The financial incentive to spam on X will decline enormously over the next 30 days and soon be negative."
Soon after, a spammer sent a message to Bier that was seemingly generated by AI. In response, Bier shared a video of himself clicking a dislike button that was on the spammer's tweet.
After that, a prompt appeared on the screen that asked Bier why he was clicking the dislike button. Some of the options to choose from were that the tweet was "AI-generated" (sounds familiar) or if it was "spam."
"Are you actually shipping the dislike button it looks great," someone commented on the video.
Bier responded, "I’m afraid that there is only one path forward."
Another X user wrote, "That's wonderful. But release it for Android too."
Though Bier's video received over 4,000 likes, many people said they didn't like the idea of X having a dislike button because it can be used in the wrong way.
"My worry is that this will make talking politics, even civilly, with people you disagree with will get your account nuked with dislikes," a different X user said. "Any tool you give for censorship will be used for censorship."
Another said, "It's awesome how you all took a problem that was basically non-existent, created it and made it overrun the platform, and now you're bragging about STARTING the process of addressing it. Thanks!"
A third added, "Won’t this lead to false reporting?"
This isn't the first time that X has tested a dislike button. In 2017, when X was still Twitter, the social media platform had a system that allowed users to report tweets they didn't like. Then, in 2022, Twitter experimented with a similar feature that was eventually discontinued.
The Daily Dot has reached out to X on when the new dislike button will be available for all users and will update once confirmed.
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