In an effort to clean up its act, Facebook took a leaf out of Reddit’s book and began testing upvote and downvote buttons for comments.

While the trial was carried out in the US, Facebook is now rolling out the new tool to more users. Going by tweets posted since the start of its rollout over the weekend, it appears that most of the users are in Australia and New Zealand.

Does Facebook now have some kind of upvote/downvote system? Never seen this before 🤨 pic.twitter.com/ysscCMq2MiApril 29, 2018

Power to the people

The new tool has been employed for comments on public posts and, Facebook insists, isn’t similar to the thumbs-up and thumbs-down options for ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ posts.

Hmmmm. Not sure I like the Upvote and Downvote feature of Facebook. Time will tell I guess. pic.twitter.com/hxvjW7HaTXApril 29, 2018

Facebook wants its users to use the new tool to downvote “bad comments” that have “bad intentions or [are] disrespectful”, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to stop users from employing the downvote button in a similar manner to the dislike option.

ok seriously facebook comments having an upvote/downvote system now is hurting my brainApril 29, 2018

Users, however, can’t seem to make up their minds about the new tool. While Facebook might be doing everything it can to recover its tarnished reputation, it might take time for the new system to work as efficiently as it does on Reddit.