If the onsen emoji (♨️) and the hamburger (🍔) show us the nuts and bolts of how emoji work, THUMBS UP (👍) shows us how we, emoji’s users, put our own stamp on them. That’s because ‘👍’ is a chameleon and a provocateur, with meanings that can vary widely depending on how old you are and where you use it.
Like many of the most common emoji, THUMBS UP was inherited from Japan’s competing emoji sets and was standardised only in 2010.1,2 Yet unlike many of its peers, ‘👍’ had a non-emoji counterpart right from the start.
Facebook’s “like” button was that counterpart, an innocuous user-interface control which debuted in February 2009, and which which was normally rendered as a blue-tinted thumbs-up gesture.3 The company had been working on a “like” button since 2007,4 and, although emoji at the time were still mostly confined to Japan, many in the tech industry knew of emoji and were working on them in one capacity or another. It’s tempting to speculate, if not to state definitively, that Facebook’s thumbs-up button could easily have been inspired by the ‘👍’ which would soon make it way into the world at large.
There’s a lot to be said about the “like” button itself (and indeed, a lot has been said about it5,6,7,8), but in the interest of getting to the point, I’d like to look specifically at what it has done to the ‘👍’ emoji. Because with fifteen years of both “like” buttons and emoji under our belts, making use of the prima facie simple THUMBS UP emoji has become anything but straightforward.
With the caveat that this is my own personal opinion, it seems plain that the “like” buttons which litter social media and messaging applications, most of which ape Facebook’s simple thumbs-up, have cheapened the corresponding emoji. (A slew of recent opinion pieces seem to agree: “The unbearable rudeness of the thumbs up emoji”;9 “Thumbs up to the season of ambivalence”10 “Gen Z Have Cancelled The Thumbs Up Emoji And Here’s Why You Should Worry”11.) By making it trivially easy to acknowledge a message with a cursory ‘👍’, the ubiquity of the “like” button has cursed its emoji counterpart with a significant gravitas shortfall.
The result is that in 2025, the ‘👍’ survives mostly within environments that are inhospitable to irony. Corporate chat systems such as Microsoft Teams are one; earnest social networks popular with older people, such as Facebook, are another. In places such as these, a ‘👍’ conveys a meaning close to its real-world inspiration: yes, I will attend your meeting. Yes, I like your pictures from Disneyland Paris. But in other contexts, a ‘👍’ is not a good thing. It is the calling card of a desperately outmoded correspondent,12 or a symbol of assent so blasé as to shoot straight past agreement and hit passive aggression instead. Sure. Whatever.9
Like ‘😂’, ‘👍’ is a convincing data point in the ongoing argument over whether we should think of emoji as a language: they can certainly be as confusing, as contradictory, and as elusive as any word.
- 1.
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Scherer, Markus, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, Darick Tong, Yasuo Kida, and Peter Edberg. “L2/10-132:/Emoji/Symbols:/Background/Data”. Unicode Consortium, April 2010.
- 2.
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The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0 - Archived Code Charts. Mountain View: The Unicode Consortium, 2010.
- 3.
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Pearlman, Leah. “I Like This”. Facebook Note. Facebook.
- 4.
- Unknown entry ↢
- 5.
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Roosendaal, Arnold. “Facebook Tracks and Traces Everyone: Like This!”. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, November 30, 2010. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1717563.
- 6.
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Levordashka, Ana, Sonja Utz, and Renee Ambros. “What’s in a Like? Motivations for Pressing the Like Button”. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 10, no. 1 (2016): 623-626. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v10i1.14768.
- 7.
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Chin, Chih-Yu, Hsi-Peng Lu, and Chao-Ming Wu. “Facebook Users’ Motivation for Clicking the ‘Like’ Button”. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal 43, no. 4 (May 24, 2015): 579-592. https://doi.org/10.2224/sbp.2015.43.4.579.
- 8.
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Eranti, Veikko, and Markku Lonkila. “The Social Significance of the Facebook Like Button”. First Monday, May 28, 2015. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i6.5505.
- 9.
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Strimpel, Zoe. “The unbearable rudeness of the thumbs up emoji”. The Spectator (blog).
- 10.
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King, Jack. “Thumbs up to the season of ambivalence”. British GQ.
- 11.
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Brandon, John. “Gen Z Have Cancelled The Thumbs Up Emoji And Here’s Why You Should Worry”. Forbes. Accessed November 7, 2025.
- 12.
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Hampson, Laura. “These emojis make you look ’old’ to Gen Z, according to new poll - Yahoo Life UK”. Yahoo! Life.