Do you ‘haha’, ‘hehe’ or ‘lol’? Facebook has you pegged

Facebook’s data team has discovered the most popular ways to laugh online, and found that whether you ‘haha’, ‘hehe’ or ‘lol’ can depend who you are.

By analysing English-language posts and comments on Facebook in the last week of May, the team found that 15 per cent of people who posted or commented that week “e-laughed” in their posts or comments.

‘Haha’ was the most common laugh (51.4 per cent), followed by various emoji (33.7 per cent) and ‘hehe’ (13.1 per cent). Hardly anyone is using ‘lol’ anymore (1.9 per cent), once the preserve of the world wide web’s earliest chatroom residents.

The data also showed that the median age for lol-ers is higher than for the rest of the expressions.

“Like any ‘dialect’, e-laughing is evolving,” wrote data scientists Udi Weinsberg, Lada Adamic and Mike Devlin on Facebook’s research blog.

Those in the east of the US – New York, Chicago – preferred to use emoji, while west-coasters in Seattle and San Francisco opted to ‘haha’.

The data also showed that young people and women prefer emoji, and men prefer longer hehes. Sarah Larson, whose article for the New Yorker prompted the study, offered an explanation for this: it’s “literally a bunch of ‘he’s”.