• Facebook is testing a downvote feature for comment sections. It's designed to cut down on spam.
• It would allow you to downvote comments that aren't "useful."
• Facebook has tested a dislike or downvote button before, but it never stuck. Will this be different?

Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to make Facebook great again, and Meta announced a tiny new feature that might be a step toward that goal.

As part of a series of features and policies aiming to cut down on spammy content, Facebook is testing a "downvote" button for comment sections. This would allow people to anonymously downvote comments that they deem less "useful."

This wouldn't be the first time something like this has come up. For nearly as long as the "like" button has existed (since 2009), the masses have yearned for a "dislike" button. Meta has toyed around with testing a feature like this, but ultimately has never done it.

Back in 2016, Facebook added the extra "reaction" emojis (smiling, laughing, hugging, loving). Geoff Teehan, a product design director at Facebook at the time, wrote a Medium post in 2016: "About a year ago, Mark [Zuckerberg] brought together a team of people to start thinking seriously about how to make the Like button more expressive."

Teehan explained why they went with additional reactions instead of just a "thumbs down" emoji:

We first needed to consider how many different reactions we should include. This might seem like a pretty straightforward task: Just slap a thumbs down next to the Like button and ship it. It's not nearly that simple though.

People need a much higher degree of sophistication and richness in what choices we provide for their communications. Binary 'like' and 'dislike' doesn't properly reflect how we react to the vast array of things we encounter in our real lives.

In 2017, Facebook also tested out a "thumbs down" reaction button for Messenger. This would've been similar to the Apple iMessage reactions that launched in the fall of 2016 and included a thumbs-down emoji.

Instagram has also considered something like this. In February of this year, Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted about a test of downvoting Instagram comments:

But will people understand what the downvote arrow actually means? Will they use it on comments that are extraneous and actually not "useful," or will they use it to try to crush comments they don't agree with or don't like?

I asked Meta about this, and a spokesperson told me that, unlike past tests of a dislike or thumbs-down button, this test will explicitly tell users that it's about being useful —a little text bubble below the button will say, "Let us know which comments aren't useful."

The test is still just a test. It might not actually end up being rolled out. Personally, I think that less-useful comments are less of a burning issue than some of the other AI-slop stuff on Facebook. (Facebook is working on combating some of that, too.) But hey, that's just my questionably useful comment.

At the Meta monopoly trial, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom accused Mark Zuckerberg of draining Instagram resources to stifle growth out of sheer jealousy.

According to Systrom, Zuckerberg may have been directly involved in yanking resources after integrating Instagram and Facebook because "as the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better—Instagram or Facebook," The Financial Times reported.

In 2025, Instagram is projected to account for more than half of Meta's ad revenue, according to eMarketer's forecast. Since 2019, Instagram has generated more ad revenue per user than Facebook, eMarketer noted, and today makes Meta twice as much per user as the closest rival that Meta claims it fears most, TikTok.

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• Everything changed for Kristi Cook when she revealed her identity on her YouTube channel Spill Sesh.
• Cook posts about celebrity gossip and influencer drama, and initially stayed anonymous.
• Revealing her face sparked some backlash, but ultimately helped her content and creativity.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with pop culture news influencer Kristi Cook. Cook's YouTube channel, Spill Sesh, has 808,000 subscribers. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I built a following on YouTube covering the lives of influencers, but I hid my own identity for years.

In 2018, I stumbled upon this community on YouTube that talked about influencer news and digital culture. I felt like mainstream news outlets weren't covering this. But I was invested in these influencers' lives.

I consumed YouTube content like crazy. I made videos and had a few different YouTube channels over the years. I also worked for TMZ and freelanced on the side.

I made a video about YouTuber Manny Mua, a makeup artist, who sent a copyright strike to the YouTube channel Tea Spill for using footage from his channel to critique him. I uploaded the video under a new channel I made, which I called Spill Sesh.

Launching the YouTube channel as an anonymous creator wasn't intentional.

I saw videos from other influencer news channels, like Tea Spill, that were just text on a screen. I thought to myself, I could do that. That's really where it began.

I didn't talk or show my face in my videos. Eventually, I added voice-overs.

I figured that if I stayed anonymous, people I knew couldn't find out what I was doing and make fun of it. I felt like I could be more myself that way. I felt like I could be funnier.

Why I decided to show my face

I honestly never thought I would be front-facing.

But being anonymous had limitations. All my videos looked the same, and there wasn't much I could do creatively with only text and audio. I also wanted to do more on-scene reporting.

I needed to be on camera to expand what I was doing and make Spill Sesh into a news outlet.

Manny Mua and I had messaged here and there on social media, and my first Spill Sesh video was about him. I thought it would be a full circle moment if I revealed my face while he did my glam.

I connected with a publicist who helped me connect with my management firm. I filmed that video with Manny in 2023 and then posted it.

I was absolutely freaking out the day I posted my face reveal.

The response at first was amazing. Everyone loved it, and there was so much positivity.

Then, the next day, people were upset that I had done the video with Manny.

It was right after the Colleen Ballinger controversy, and Manny had published a podcast episode where he and his cohost were accused of protecting her. He was also friends at the time with YouTuber James Charles, who admitted to sending sexually explicit messages to underage boys. People were upset with Manny, so viewers were upset with me.

In the moment, I thought the backlash to my face reveal was ridiculous. I had made so many videos calling people out, especially Ballinger.

Mostly, I felt sad that people thought I was acting fake or was a fraud.

Luckily, the backlash passed as time went on.

The internet was so messy back then. YouTubers and influencers were ruthless. Everyone was trying to expose one another, and it just felt like a hot fire pit. Now, everyone is a little more reserved.

But revealing my face threw me into that drama.

Before, nobody knew who I was, so if I was in the same room with someone I had just made a video about, it wouldn't be weird. We were going to parties at the Team 10 house, to Tana Mongeau's birthday parties — everyone in the industry was going everywhere. The downside to revealing my identity was that it sometimes made it awkward with other creators.

Yet, overall, revealing my identity has opened a lot of doors. It's made everything much more exciting and refreshed.

How my life has changed since revealing my identity online

Now, it's great to tell people at events what I actually do. I used to just tell people I worked in social media. I no longer have anxiety about describing my job. I can actually network and meet people at events.

After revealing my identity, I started to get invited to more exclusive influencer events. For instance, last week, TikTok invited me to Universal Studios Hollywood. We spent a day there listening to people talk about film and TV on TikTok. I got to meet with other creators, go on a studio tour, and to the park. I'd never been to Universal, so this was a sick experience.

I've tried to keep my content relatively the same. The videos look the same, I'm just in them for the first couple of seconds.

Now that I show my face, I take a more neutral stance on the topics I cover. I started to feel like it's not my place to share an opinion on what's going on. Instead, I share both sides, what happened, and what people are saying.

I can also be more creative. It's easier for me to create content instead of trying to find different assets to make a video exciting. Overall, showing my face has definitely boosted my content because I've been able to make way more of it.

Meta is developing a version of Instagram for iPad, according to The Information. Currently, running Instagram on an iPad is just a blown-up version of the iPhone app, so an official Instagram app from Meta would be a very welcome change.

Why would Meta do this now, after ignoring Apple’s tablet for over a decade? According to The Information, the uncertain legal status of TikTok amid the divest-or-ban law and Trump’s tariffs might be the push required.

The company has publicly resisted building an iPad Instagram app before. In February 2022 (more than three years ago!) Instagram boss Adam Mosseri replied to a post from Marques Brownlee about Meta still not having an Instagram app for iPad to explain why.

“We get this one a lot,” Mosseri said. “It’s still just not a big enough group of people to be a priority. Hoping to get to it at some point, but right now we’re very heads down on other things.”

In 2023, Mosseri said something similar. “Not working on it right now,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing to do at some point. But we have only so many people working at Instagram, so we’ve got to pick the most important things to do to improve Instagram at any given moment. And right now, it’s not quite making the cut.”

Using the Instagram app in Stage Manager on supported iPads is a decent experience, and the web app has improved in recent years. But a native version that takes full advantage of the large display is long overdue.

Meta didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.