Facebook introduces tool that makes it easier to find and mass-delete embarrassing or undesirable posts buried in your timeline
- The platform will now allow users to delete old posts en masse
- Facebook says it can help users prune their accounts when entering the job market or moving on from a relationship
- Its update makes it easier to recover posts that have been deleted by accident
- For now it will only be available on mobile and Facebook Lite
Facebook just made pruning one’s page of old and potentially embarrassing posts a lot easier.
For the first time ever, the platform will let users select multiple old posts and delete them in bulk as opposed to one at a time in an attempt to ‘to make it easy for you to curate your presence on Facebook to more accurately reflect who you are today.’
‘Whether you’re entering the job market after college or moving on from an old relationship, we know things change in people’s lives, and we want to make it easy for you to curate your presence on Facebook to more accurately reflect who you are today.’ said the company in a statement.
The feature, called ‘Manage Activity’ can be accessed through mobile by navigating to ‘Settings & Privacy’ and then tapping on ‘Activity Log.’
Facebook will make it easier for users to mass deleted old posts in an effort to give users greater control over their own content (stock)
While a seemingly subtle change, anyone that has ever attempted to cleanse their accounts of old pictures with exes, cringe-worthy status updates, or Farmville notifications, knows that the process could be fairly laborious.
In addition to letting users delete posts in bulk, the update – which expands on Facebook’s ‘Manage Activity function – will also give people the option to sort their posts by a time range.
This should be useful especially for users who know they want to weed account content from a specific time period.
The process of deleting content will also become more forgiving.
Instead of permanently wiping posts right away, Facebook will put deleted posts into a ‘trash bin’ for 30 days so users can recover posts that they’ve changed their minds about or have deleted by accident.
The added granularity in deleting posts stands in contrast to other social media rivals like Twitter which still lacks a native tool that is capable of deleting old tweets en masse.
For now the ability to delete old posts in bulk on Facebook will only be available on mobile and Facebook lite, but will come to desktop in the future according to the company.