Still, 15 percent of people who commented or posted during that week laughed in some way.
Advertisement
The study focused on Facebook posts and did not include direct messages, where users would be more likely to “e-laugh”, the Daily Mail reports.
Facebook has more of a breakdown here.
The new research was on the heels of an article by Sarah Larson for the New Yorker that summarised the rise of e-laughter in the digital age.
And based on the results it got, it prepared a small pie chart which explain us the number of users using each way of expression with percentages. The darker the green, the more popular a laugh is in that state.
Do you do a lot of laughing online?
Social norms online are changing, and a new Facebook study reveals people just aren’t using term to laugh-out-loud anymore.
Gender, age and location also seemed to have an effect. “We did the matching with regular expressions which automatically identified laughter in the text, including variants of haha, hehe, emoji, and lol“, the post explains.
The company also looked at laughter length, finding that in a specific response to Larson’s assertion that “ha’s” and “he’s” are akin to Lego pieces, people add more letters if they find something particularly amusing, VentureBeat reported.
Advertisement
The vast majority of people are “haha-ers” (51.4 percent), then emoji lovers (33.7 percent), the “hehe-ers” (12.7 percent) and finally, the “lol-ers” (1.9 percent). “Presidential campaigns, take note: the battleground states of Ohio and Virginia are haha states, while the candidates’ emoji games will surely be key in determining who emerges victorious in Florida”.
