Last Friday, April 26, 2013, Facebook launched a series of new smileys, or emoticons, 16 animated faces with expressions such as happy, surprise and grateful to give to users of facebook a tool to express feelings. In the Swedish Newspaper Svenska Dagbladet of 30 April 2013 the journalist Agneta Lagercrantz describes the research Facebook has been involved in over the last year to test how people easily can pass on feelings to each other via different report functions. One of the findings of the research is that different cultures deal with conflicts around the posted pictures differently. Facebook learned to phrase their newly introduced questions such as “why do you dislike this picture” differently in different cultures. One of the answers is, that the picture embarrasses you. In India they found out that if the text of choice about embarrassement is changed into “the picture you uploaded concerns someone or something I care for, can you please remove it?” many more people reported it. It would be wonderful if Facebook would allow for research on cultural differences as there must be a wealth of interesting findings on internet behavioural differences across cultures!
Gigi de Groot 