The science behind Facebook's new emoji

Adam Mosseri has a very important job. As head of Facebook's news feed, Mosseri and his team were assigned the task of determining which six cartoon images would accompany the social network's ubiquitous thumbs-up button.
They did not take the task lightly. To help choose the right emoji to join “like,“ Mosseri said Facebook consulted with several academic sociologists “about the range of human emotion.“

The decision was reached after much deliberation. Arriving at the best of those trivial and common picture faces followed a lot of data crunching and outside help.

Mosseri combined the sociologists' feedback with data showing what people do on Facebook, he said. The goal was to reduce the need for people to post a comment to express themselves.“We wanted to make it easier,“ he said. “When things are easier to do, they reach more people, and more people engage with them.“

The set of emoji that Facebook settled on is similar to the reaction buttons that social network Path has been offering since 2012. And Facebook already allows every user to comment with any emoji, digital sticker, or animated Gif they want to--an almost unlimited variety.