As mobile communication becomes increasingly popular, it’s not only our language that is changing but also the way we laugh. Facebook recently analyzed data from its users, collected from public posts and comments, containing standard expressions identifying laughter online. They subsequently analyzed the popularity of different types of e-laughter as well as demographic data. 

The most common form of laughter found on Facebook is the “haha,” accounting for over half of all expressions of e-laughter on the social network during the study’s duration. The second most popular form was the emoji, accounting for about 34% of all e-laughs and identified in the following forms:

It’s no surprise that emojis are becoming more popular as a form of e-laughter as their use and variety has steadily risen with increased texting and social media use. As reported here, emojis are being used as passwords for digital banking in the UK. 

In addition to the dominant “haha” and emoji, the other most popular expressions of e-laughter found by the Facebook team are the “hehe,” and, accounting for about 2% of all e-laughs, the “lol.” Perhaps the “lol” or “laugh out loud,” once a dominant mode of e-laughter, is losing ground to the aforementioned emoji or simply evolving, as the research noted incarnations of “lolz” and “loll” but did not account for additional configurations of the acronym. 

This raises the question of whether research such as this provides an accurate indication of our use of language online – as the research only accessed publicly-accessible posts and comments, perhaps there is a difference in how Facebook users express themselves in private conversation. Additionally, people do like to put their own spin on e-laughs, as the research also indicates that “a ha is like a lego piece, which people use to convey different "levels" of laughter, ranging from the polite haha to a deranged hahahahahahaha.” At one point in the study, their “automatic regular expression parser gave up after trying to get through a haha over 600 letters long!”