Sympathy can't be reduced to a Facebook button

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/10/facebook-sympathy-button

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What would it mean to turn sympathy into a button? Apparently Facebook has already done so although has not yet made plans to launch it. The button has been developed as a solution to the difficulty of responding with "likes" to a status where someone posts bad news – as if users were not already able to negotiate this small hurdle.

Facebook is proposing a menu of negative emotions that you can select when posting your status, choosing from which will allow people to respond with sympathy. But there's already the option of commenting on rather than liking bad news statuses – so if someone posts that they're ill, for example, you can write "get well soon" instead of risking looking like you're happy about their condition. Given the flexibility that already exists, a sympathy button seems both patronising towards users, and as though Facebook is trying to encroach further into the range and distribution of human emotions by turning them all into clickable options.

What might come after the sympathy button – disgust buttons? Rage buttons? Anyone who has ever kicked a supermarket self check-out machine as it insisted there is an unknown item in the bagging area, will know what machines have done for anger. Emotion buttons on social networks may end up like emoticons in text, which developed as an inventive and diverting way of getting around the difficulty of conveying emotions in a form of communication void of vocal or facial expression. But the trouble is that Facebook works by counting likes. It gives your status a popularity score. So if the sympathy button works in a similar way, that means that users will also get a sympathy score.

A significant part of the like function on Facebook is to win over an audience. Facebook uses an algorithm that determines what appears on a user's news feed with both a likes score and the quantity of that user's interactions. The more likes a status has, the more likely you are to see it, and the more you interact with people, the more attention you will get. If you don't spend much time on Facebook you will get much less attention and fewer likes than someone who posts and interacts frequently. But the effect of the news feed algorithm is that the more of your time you give to Facebook, the more liked it will make you feel.

The news feed algorithm means that Facebook is not an unbiased reflection of reality – it twists things according to attention, and manipulates users into using it more. Might the addition of a sympathy button encourage people to post bad news in order to get more sympathy? Might it pander to self-absorption, and encourage people to behave like bawling narcissists? And when someone genuinely needs support, would counting up a score really help them? Cyberbullying is of course a too real problem that has had tragic consequences on other less thought out social media sites, and in light of this Facebook should check itself. Sympathy motivates us to give advice, spend time with other people, and give help to people who need it. Feeling sympathy should motivate people to action. Turning sympathy into a clickable button or a measurable quantity, manipulated according to our devotion to Facebook, would surely help to nullify that.

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