Facebook: Haha Has Killed LOL

Several weeks ago, Sarah Larson from The New Yorker published a fun article about e-laughter (all the hahas and lols we use to communicate with our friends online) and their social subtleties. Like any "dialect," e-laughing is evolving. Curious as to whether her usage followed up-to-date social norms, she consulted her savvy friends for answers. Anecdotally, she found that laughter tended to vary by age and gender.

But why rely on anecdotes when you have data? We analyzed de-identified posts and comments posted on Facebook in the last week of May with at least one string of characters matching laughter¹. We did the matching with regular expressions which automatically identified laughter in the text, including variants of haha, hehe, emoji, and lol².

As denizens of the Internet will know, laughter is quite common: 15% of people included laughter in a post or comment that week. The most common laugh is haha, followed by various emoji and hehe. Age, gender and geographic location play a role in laughter type and length: young people and women prefer emoji, whereas men prefer longer hehes. People in Chicago and New York prefer emoji, while Seattle and San Francisco prefer hahas. Let's dive in.

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Ms. Larson's first concern was that she laughs a lot, whereas some of her friends are "above it and don't use has too much." We found that roughly 15% of the people who posted or commented during that week used at least one e-laugh. So Ms. Larson - have no worries - it's pretty common to laugh online!

For those people that laughed, we analyzed how many times they laughed. The plot below shows the distribution of the number of laughs, indicating that around 46% of the people posted only a single laugh during the week, and 85% posted fewer than five laughs. The plot also shows how many different laughs people used (labeled as 'Unique') - 52% of people used a single type of laugh, and roughly 20% used two different types.

Since most people used a single type of laugh, we classified people in our dataset into four categories based on their most commonly used laugh. For brevity of the plots, we write these as haha, hehe, lol and emoji. Keep in mind that the class label includes a wide range of laughs, e.g., haha includes terms like haha, hahaha, haahhhaa, etc. Here's the breakdown: