How to Activate Facebook Messenger's Valentine's Day Update
Step one: make it Facebook official.
Facebook revealed on Tuesday the next step in its master plan to boost meaningful interactions on its platform: become an integral part of your romantic relationship. Enter a few “fun and delightful” features that are now in Facebook Messenger, in time for Valentine’s Day.
What Are the New Features?
Single folk beware: as with most Valentine’s Day gimmicks, the new features are restricted to couples. But the single among us can take comfort in the fact that the Messenger additions aren’t really innovative changes; they’re mostly a visual assault of the same romantic iconography we see every Valentine’s Day, repackaged as camera filters and emojis.
Seems really new and exciting!
How to Use the New Features
The first thing you need to do to access the new features is join a Facebook relationship. Starting on Wednesday, if you change your romantic status to indicate a connection with a fellow Facebook user, the Messenger app will automatically notify you to open a chat with that person. Once you open the chat, an avalanche of hearts will cascade down your screen.
From there, you can basically do everything that you could previously do in Messenger, but with extra heart-themed filters and emojis. One new feature described in the update is “chatting with bae,” which means that your Facebook official romantic partner will appear at the top of your list of active friends. How scandalous!
Facebook Messenger’s Official Romance Stats
Facebook analysis published on Tuesday shows that people share more than two billion emojis per day on the service, and the second most popular among both men and women is the heart emoji. At last — proof that Facebook Messenger is where people fall in love.
It’s kind of a weird move by Facebook to insinuate that their platform is the most romantic of all the messengers. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed; while the features aren’t yet accessible, some have already taken to Twitter to express confusion over Facebook’s foray into our romantic lives.
Facebook’s new model seems to be to remove the platform from the political sphere, and instead invade users personal relationships. But hey, if it takes Facebook Messenger becoming an active participant in my relationship to stop the spread of fake news, then count me in.
I’ll be skipping the flowers and starting Valentine’s Day by making my relationship FB official. Nothing says love like a selfie.
