Twitter is testing out a dislike button on the social media platform, the company confirmed on Wednesday.
Some iOS users reported that they were seeing messages on the app that read: "Dislikes aren't public or visible to the author, while Likes are. They both help us understand what people think is valuable to the conversation."
Twitter said in a statement Wednesday, "We're testing this to understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them. Your downvotes aren't public, while your upvotes will be shown as likes."
The company added that only a small batch of users would see the new option to "dislike" tweets as Twitter figures out how the feature would be rolled out across the platform. It is unclear if the app will eventually expand these features to all users.
The company's chief product officer Kayvon Beykpour first confirmed Twitter was "exploring" the idea of adding a dislike feature last year.
While Twitter allows users to "react" using different emojis on direct messages between users, the social media platform has limited the options on tweets to liking, retweeting and replying.
The announcement comes just weeks after YouTube declared that it was making changes to its dislike feature.
Back in March, the video-sharing platform said that while it was not removing dislikes all together, it would remove the number of dislikes a video has from appearing next to the thumbs down button, citing the well-being of content creators and "targeted dislike campaigns."
Last week, actor, early Twitter user and tech investor Ashton Kutcher called on Twitter to introduce a dislike button during an interview at an AT&T event in New York.
"If we just gave people a very simple, frictionless way to say, 'I disagree with this,' you would probably reduce a massive amount of the sort of negative swaller that exists inside of social media," he said.
Kutcher argued that users can sometimes misconstrue social media posts online, which can lead to a "massive escalation, and the mob mentality around that escalation," and has created a very different social network than the one he joined back in 2009.
"It was this community where you could try ideas," he recalled. "You didn't have to be right."
"Now it's cut your head off, cancel you, you're done," he continued. "That's more of a comment on society than it is on social media. Society's become intolerant."
