Facebook is finally adding a new feature called Manage Activity that lets users delete their old posts. It can be used to remove individual posts or in bulk, and Facebook announces it will offer filtering choices to help find posts with specific people in them or within a particular time range. The feature will be available on Facebook’s mobile apps first.
According to Facebook, the feature is intended “to make it easy for you to curate your appearance on Facebook to reflect who you are today more accurately.” As an example, it suggests that someone might want to delete old posts when they’re about to start working full time after college or delete posts that remind them of a past relationship.
There are a couple of different options to remove a post from the timeline. It can be sent to the trash, where it will be removed from public viewing immediately but only permanently deleted 30 days later. (Posts can be manually deleted sooner.) Alternatively, a post can be archived, which means it’s no longer public but can still be viewed privately.
Twitter is another public platform where you might want to delete your old posts. However, the company has yet to provide an official bulk-delete tool, which has proven to be a problem when old tweets have been dug up in an attempt to discredit or otherwise cause trouble for people. In the absence of an official tool on Twitter, various third-party tweet deletion services have sprung up.
Manage Activity is Facebook’s latest attempt to give users more control over their data. Last year, it finally launched its Clear History tool, which lets users disconnect their web browsing data from their Facebook account. However, despite its name, Clear History doesn’t delete this data; it just removes the link between it and your Facebook account.
