Nobody lols any more, they haha and hehe instead.
Facebook has completed a thorough check of all the ways that people laugh on the internet, and has ruled the “lol” dead. A range of different laughs have taken its place, varying greatly depending on age, gender and location.
The site took the posts of its users and organised them into four different forms: “haha”, “hehe”, “lol” and “emoji”. Those four groups included a wide range of different laughs — so “haha” includes “hahaha”, for instance.
The site found that 51.4 per cent of the people who laughed use “haha”. Emoji was the second biggest way of communicating a laugh, at 33.7 per cent; hehe represented 13.1 per cent; and 1.9 per cent said “lol”.
The Facebook study followed an article in the New Yorker about the various ways that people laugh on the internet. Its author, Sarah Larson, asked friends and picked apart the different words and symbols that people use — but Facebook decided to do the same investigation using big data.
The study found some counter-intuitive results. Larson said, for instance, that hehe was being forced upon older people “by the youth”.
But the Facebook findings showed that “haha” was still the most popular way of laughing across all groups. Emoji was more popular among young people, and lol was bigger among older Facebook users.
Graph and data: Facebook
The site also looked the lengths of each haha and hehe. Larson said that the “the ‘ha’ is like a Lego, a building block, with which we can construct more elaborate hilarity”.
It found that people tended to stick bits of ha and he together, with four and fix letters the most common in both haha and hehe forms.
Graph and data: Facebook
Generally, the use of each laugh didn’t vary between different groups as much as might be expected. Both men and women had the same most common laugh — haha followed by emoji, for instance — though men liked haha more and women liked emoji.
Graph and data: Facebook
Geographically, people also tend to laugh the same way. But “emoji” is exceptionally popular in Chicago, for instance, where they also use “hehe” a lot less than the population at large.
Graph and data: Facebook
Facebook noted that it looked at posts and comments for the data and didn't use Messenger, pointing out that people might write differently in private chats.
Facebook has used its huge troves of data on how people talk to try and understand a range of behaviour online — from finding that the site mostly tells people what they want to believe, through to a highly-controversial study that manipulated users' moods to see how happy and sad updates affected them.
