Twitter could be about to introduce new ways of shunning words with a range of ‘reaction emojis’ which would provide an alternative to the divisive ‘heart’ icon.
The company is currently testing several alternatives to the current heart reaction which has thus far been the only emoji-based reaction to tweets.
A developer build of Twitter contained the new emojis which range from crying faces to ‘100’ signs, similar to team-based chat system Slack’s offering.
Twitter user @_Ninji posted this reaction to stumbling upon the new feature.
https://twitter.com/statuses/666203311809429504
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Users mounted a backlash to the company’s recent decision to replace the favourite icon, previously a star, with a heart, thereby changing favourites to ‘likes’.
One of the complaints was that the heart icon is less ambiguous than the star, so favouriting tweets became more of an endorsement rather than a way to mark them as significant.
With the new range of emojis, Twitter would be giving users more choice when it comes to reacting to tweets.
If launched officially, the new emoji reactions would follow Facebook’s recent introduction of a similar series of alternative reactions to the original ‘like’ feature.
It is not clear yet whether the new reactions will be officially rolled out as they only currently exist on the developer preview version of the site.
TrustedReviews has approached Twitter for comment.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
