If the sight of the word ‘lol’ languishing in the middle of a Facebook post seeps all of the humour and laughter from the message, it turns out you’re not alone. When it comes to expressing laughter online, Facebook has crunched the numbers and released the data, revealing that “e-laughing is evolving” and that ‘lol’, once the darling of txt-speak smirking, lags behind in fourth place.

The world’s most popular social network has analysed posts and responses containing markers of laughter during a single week in May, and found that ‘haha’ is the most popular way of chuckling on a computer screen. This is followed by emoji, ‘hehe’, and then ‘lol’.

A violin graph showing the median (dotted line) age of e-laughter users [Facebook]

In analysing the data, Facebook’s report shows that choosing a variant way to laugh online can often be influenced by factors such as age, gender, and location. “Young people and women prefer emoji,” the report claims, “Whereas men prefer longer hehes. People in Chicago and New York prefer emoji, while Seattle and San Francisco prefer hahas.”

The study also found that most people are more likely to only use one sole way of e-laughing, with only about one in five Facebook users switching between two. And when it comes to emoji, a single icon is used almost 50% of the time, and it is extremely rare to see Facebook users comment or post the same consecutive emoji five times in a row, leading the team to ask whether the yellow images offer a more nuanced way to convey different registers of laughter.