Laughing at death: Facebook, the ‘haha’ reaction, and death coverage on local US news pages

ABSTRACT

Is it inappropriate to “like” a Facebook post announcing death? That was the concern of Meta’s leadership in 2016, when they implemented emoji reactions (e.g. sadness and love) to help users more appropriately respond to tragic events. The expectation was that these new reactions would promote compassion in the face of grief, but in the years since many observers now label the “haha” laughing emoji as a particularly menacing reaction used to troll the misfortune of others. To date though, little academic work has sought to explore such claims. Across hundreds of millions of reactions to death on the platform spanning nearly a decade, this paper demonstrates the size and scope of the haha trolling phenomenon on Facebook—including its exponential growth during the pandemic. Using the automated tools of natural language analysis, this study also sheds some light on the potential motivations behind this socially deviant behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• haha reaction
• laughing emoji
• death trolling
• RIP trolling

Disclosure statement

The author is a member of a team that has been granted a Facebook research award for a separate project. Those funds were not used for the current paper, nor did the award influence this study in any way.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2023.2287738

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Justin Bonest Phillips

Justin Phillips is a political scientist and Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He specializes in political communication research, particularly on social media utilizing big datasets.