How do people express laughter on Facebook?

Aug 10, 2015 08:29 GMT  ·  By

The Facebook Research team has sifted through user comments and posts to reveal what kind of expression people utilize to express laughter on the social network.

Analyzing data from the last week of May, the company's research staff looked at common expressions used to portray laughter, like "lol," "hehe," "haha" and (laughing) emojis.

The research team's results shows how people of different ages and genders, from different parts of the US, use different ways of expressing joy and laughter.

According to the Facebook team, 15% of all people who commented that week used a sign to show e-laugh, 52% used a single type of laugh, while 20% used two types of e-laugh.

51.4% of people used "haha" or one of its derivatives, 33.7% used an emoji primarily, 13.1% used "hehe" and its derivatives, while surprisingly for its meme status, "lol" was used by only 1.9% of users.

"Haha" is the most used e-laugh sign

As The New Yorker has recently pointed out, the new generation of online users seems to favor using "hehe" over anything else when expressing laughter, a finding the Facebook statistic has not confirmed.

According to the research, "haha" is the predominant e-laugh symbol across all age groups, while the younger groups tend to prefer emojis, and not "hehe."

The same article also pointed out that "hehe" was spread amongst males more than women, which the research confirmed, but it also pointed out that both men and women liked to use "haha" most of the times, and women also prefer emojis just as much as "haha."

When it came to distribution of data across the United States, most people who liked to lol lived in Texas, Florida, and California; most people who liked to use "hehe" were from Washington (state), California, and New Mexico; most people who used "haha" were from northern states; while most emoji users lived in Florida, Alabama, Wyoming, and Illinois.

This about sums up one of the most useless statistics we ever read.

People prefer "haha" when laughing on Facebook
People prefer "haha" when laughing on Facebook

Facebook's research on e-laughs (7 Images)

Facebook studied how people laugh online
People prefer "haha" when laughing on FacebookPoeple tend to laugh one time a week
+4more