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One of the great (and misunderstood if you’re David Cameron) millennial phrases is on the way out: no one is using LOL anymore.
That’s according to some new research by Facebook, which analysed a week’s worth of posts to the social network to find out how the internet laughs. The data showed that when people express laughter on Facebook they do so with ‘hahas’ or emoji rather than LOL.
Surprising, given the phrase’s place in the dictionary, and at one point in the centre of daily news when the prime minister said he thought it meant “lots of love”.
But it seems no-one is LOL-ing on Facebook anymore, as just 1.9% of the analysed posts contained a LOL: with ‘haha’ the most popular, appearing in 51.4% of posts.
The next most popular is using an emoji (33.7%) and then ‘hehe’ (13.1%), before we finally get to LOL.
Maybe it’s a young person thing? And those who were in the midst of teenage social media frenzies are now older and have ditched the phrase? Wrong; Facebook’s research found that LOL actually had the highest median age, and remained in use longer as users got older.
Yet total use is a fraction of the alternatives. Though use was slightly higher among women than men, but it was nothing compared to the others.
Facebook doesn’t appear to have an answer why either – though perhaps it’s because old habits die hard, and typing out ‘haha’ has been a staple of e-communication for many years now. Emoji is the on-trend way of expressing yourself in text too; leaving LOL out in the cold.
