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How do you laugh on Facebook? Emojis usurp lolz, haha reigns supreme, finds laughter study

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By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

August 10, 2015 | 2 min read

Lol, the much maligned acronym of laugh-out-loud oft slighted as the face of 'text speak' is used much more infrequently than you'll probably believe according to data recently released by Facebook.

Anonymous user data gathered during the last week of May was collected by the social network to, among other things, compare the use of haha, hehe, laughter emoji and lol on the site to get a better idea of how Facebookers laugh.

The social network found that 52 per cent of people used a single type of laugh and roughly a fifth only used two, a convenience when it came to categorising users into groups.

Haha (and common deviations including (hahaha, haahhhaa, etc) was found to be the most common exclamation of laughter among English speaking users - sitting ahead of emojis, hehes and lols.

Females were found to be slightly more likely to lol than their male counterparts.

The data also analysed the lolz by state. Southern states displayed the greatest use of the abbreviation.

The terms are fairly evenly distributed across the age groups although youths are more likely to adopt emojis first.

The study did not analyse direct messages sent through the Messenger app, only posts and comments on the site.

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