About

Plane Emoji React, also known as Plane React, refers to a plane emoji that was temporarily added to Facebook reactions in late July 2018.

Origin

On July 31st, 2018, some Facebook users discovered that a plane emoji could be selected when using Facebook's reaction feature to posts and comments (shown below).

Spread

The same day, the internet news blog 8shit^[2] published an article with instructions on how to enable the reaction on Facebook. In order to enable the emoji, users needed to update their Facebook mobile app, then clear the app's cache. Two anger reactions would then be available to select, the 2nd of which would be displayed as a plane emoji (shown below).

Meanwhile, the internet news site Heavy^[4] reported that other users were seeing the fire or flower emojis on the reaction bar (shown below). Also on July 31st, Redditor umotex12 submitted a post asking "What's this Facebook plane reaction and how do I get it?" to /r/OutOfTheLoop.^[1]

That day, The Daily Dot^[3] published a statement from a Facebook employee, who revealed it was created "as part of an employee hackathon" and that it "wasn’t cleared for takeoff."

Search Interest

External References