• A reverse engineer noted for spotting new features on social media apps has seen a potential return of the downvote button for X (formerly Twitter).
• This was a feature that the platform had previously tested out in 2021, prior to Elon Musk acquiring Twitter at the time.
• While it could be abused, the downvote button may also work as a means of moderating misinformation on X.

Many social media platforms make use of downvote buttons, with the most notable being Reddit. While YouTube has chosen to keep the count for its own version of the feature hidden, others have played around with the idea of having a downvote button on posts.

One such platform is X (formerly Twitter), which may be contemplating a return of the feature is the code spotted by a reverse engineer is to be believed. Here Aaron Perris has uncovered some new features (embedded below) ahead of an official launch, or perhaps being tested internally by X.

The code was seen in the iOS version of X, but unlike Reddit which uses downvotes as a means of moderating the quality of content, it looks like X would use the button in replies in order to improve how they are ranked.

As such, it could be used as a means of addressing the scourge of X users replying to trending posts hawking their own content instead of wanting to engage in the discourse that may be happening online.

This is not the first time that X has contemplated a downvote button, as TechCrunch notes that it played around with the idea in 2021 prior to Elon Musk completing his purchase of the company.

At the time of writing, the discovery has not been confirmed as officially on the cards, but some engineers at X have shared their thoughts. Most notably Jay Baxter, senior staff machine learning engineer, who noted that simply adding up downvotes in and of itself is not useful, but if implemented in the way that Community Notes is, could be a handy moderation tool.

While X is yet to officially comment on the code discovery, should a downvote button indeed be making its way to the fully fledged version of the app, it will be interesting to see how it chooses to make it available.

In recent months key features have only been made available to X subscribers, but if it is aiming to use this new tool to better moderate its platform, making it accessible to all would make the most sense.

Either way it will be interesting to see how it is implemented should the feature indeed be making its way out of the testing phase.

[Image – Photo by Jackie Alexander on Unsplash]