Facebook set out to understand "written laughter" in a recent study and gather data on how people use different types, such as "haha," "hehe," "lol" and emojis.
Sarah Larson, reporter for the New Yorker, recently wrote an article called HAHAHA VS. HEHEHE, which became Facebook's start-off point in its study, using hard-data obtained from public Facebook platforms.
The study revealed that 15 percent of people include laughter in a post or comment, as gathered from the public posts and comments made by Facebook users during the last week of May.
The most common laugh is "haha," used by 51.4 percent of the people in the dataset. This is followed by emojis at 33.7 percent, "hehe" at 12.7 percent and "lol" at 1.9 percent.
Age, gender and geographic location play a role in laughter type and length, as young people and women prefer emojis, whereas men prefer longer "hehes." People in Chicago and New York prefer emojis, while those in Seattle and San Francisco prefer "hahas," according to the study published by Facebook.
The company also looked at laughter length, finding that in a specific response to Larson's assertion that "ha's" and "he's" are akin to Lego pieces, people add more letters if they find something particularly amusing, VentureBeat reported.
It should be noted that only data obtained from public platforms were used, since Facebook did not use private data from Messenger, its instant messaging app.
