What you need to know
- Twitter is sending out surveys that ask users what emojis they might want to use in a reaction to a tweet.
- The surveys have sparked rumors that the company plans to bring emoji reactions to its platform.
You might soon be able to react to a tweet with a laughing face or mad face emoji.
As reported by TechCrunch, Twitter has been surveying users of the last month to see what kinds of emojis they would want to be available for use in reacting to a tweet. The functionality sounds exactly like Facebook, which lets you react to a post with a number of different emojis.
"We're exploring additional ways for people to express themselves in conversations happening on Twitter," a Twitter spokesperson said of the survey.
There seem to be multiple options of the same survey as users are seeing a different set of emojis depending on the survey they take. This is obviously a tactic by Twitter to get a wide range of feedback and narrow down the list to the most popular emojis that would make the most sense.
Specifically, Twitter's survey proposed a few different sets of reaction emojis, all of which include the heart (like), laughing face with tears (funny), thinking face (interesting) and crying face (sad).More controversially, Twitter is considering a way for users to signal a general like or dislike for the tweet with either a thumbs up or thumbs down, a "100" in either green or red to indicate "agree" or "disagree," or a green up arrow icon or red down arrow icon, reminiscent of Reddit's upvote and downvote mechanisms.
Twitter has said that the surveys are currently only exploratory and that, if they are added as an option, the "heart" reaction will still exist alongside the rest of the options.
Twitter told TechCrunch the work it's doing in the space of reactions is exploratory — it's only running this survey now because the company is thinking about ways people could add more nuance to the conversations they're having, and how, by doing so, readers would be able to better understand the additional context around those conversations. Plus, Twitter notes that the new emoji reactions would not replace the "heart;" they're additive.
If you want to explore the world of third-party Twitter apps, check out our list of the Best Twitter Apps for iPhone in 2021.
Twitter has been ramping up its new features lately. The company is close to adding better image support and is also testing out an undo button.
