Social Media

Research by Facebook suggests “hehe,” “haha,” and emoji have killed the once popular three little letters known as LOL and meaning laughing out loud. Indeed, a new Facebook report finds that only 1.9 percent of us are Lol-ers. And the majority of those people are among an older group of Facebook users. What’s killing “LOL” is our preference for “haha”s “hehe”s, and emoji. The report reveals that more than half of Facebook users express laughter with a “haha,” 13 percent prefer “hehe,” and a whopping third of users don’t even use words: For younger users, a smiley face says it all. So why is a shorthand that was so popular that it made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary on the verge of extinction? One reason might be because it has an ambiguous meaning. When a friend texts you a simple “LOL,” she could be actually laughing, expressing sarcasm, or just being dismissive, wrote psychologist Marcia Eckerd at Psychology Today.