Hahaha or lol: Facebook research reveals e-laughter data

How do you usually express laughter on Facebook - ’lol’, ‘haha’ or ‘hehe’? Now, Facebook has published new data showing how people express laughter online. 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. Soon, Facebook used real data to analyse it. “We analyzed de-identified posts and comments posted on Facebook in the last week of May with at least one string of characters matching laughter. 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 most common laugh is haha, which is followed by others like emoji and hehe. Age, gender and geographic location also play a role in laughter type and length. For instance, young people and women prefer emoji and men prefer longer hehes. The research blog also created a pie chart showing the different types of laughs.  The chart divides people using four types of laughs - haha, hehe, lol and emoji. However, it should be noted that the class label includes a wide range of laughs, e.g., haha includes terms like haha, hahaha, haahhhaa, so on.  The research also shows the median person (the dashed line) that uses emoji is slightly younger than the median haha person. However, both are younger than the people using hehes and lols.