Facebook develops 'sympathise' button to avoid 'awkward Likes' on sad statuses

Facebook has reportedly developed a ‘sympathise’ button to save users the embarrassment of hitting ‘Like’ even for sad statuses, solely because they lack any option.

The button replaces the ‘Like’ option when a user selects a negative emotion from Facebook’s list of feelings in a status update.

An engineer for the social networking giant, Dan Muriello, said that the button had been created as part of an internal project but there were no plans to launch the button at the moment, the BBC reports.

Muriello said that the option would not work for every post but only when the posts are tagged with certain emotions, which signify sadness, like a close one’s death, accident, or may be even a bad day, the report added.