Has Facebook just rolled out a dislike button for comments?

If you have logged on to Facebook today and checked out the comments on a Facebook page, you may have noticed something a little different. Below every comment is the down and up arrows but what is this for?

From what we can workout, it’s a way of users being able to upvote and downvote comments. The more upvotes a comment gets the higher up the list of comments it will go. The opposite for the downvotes.

Is this a way of Facebook introducing a dislike button? Not really, because from what I can establish the amount of downvotes is not visible. The casting of a upvote can be struck out by an additional downvote and vice versa. For example, if a comment has 5 upvotes and you cast a downvote, it brings the total amount of upvotes down to 4.

The downvote is a way of flagging those comments that are distasteful or abusive and pushing them further down the list. It could be a way of censoring comment, especially comments that don’t fit the popular theme on that post. But I can also see the benefits of pushing down the comments by the trolls.

It will be interesting to see if people are prepared to engage with this new feature, it appears on selected Facebook “Pages” at the moment, and only on the mobile apps – not via the web.