If you’ve been on Facebook any time, you’ve certainly collected a lot of messages, some of which you wish you hadn’t even posted. Well, you might want to conceal your previous entries from an employer or a board of college admissions — or you might just want to increase your personal security by removing recognizable information.
In June, Facebook declared that it considers a bulk-delete power tool for the mobile application, making it simple for you to get rid of all your past messages. The hope is that you’ll now have an opportunity to pick and remove any or all of your embarrassing posts at once, says TheNextWeb. When you want to really clean up your messy Facebook backlog, however, this iteration of the app leaves it to be craved.
Here’s how it works right now:
- Tap on the three little dots that are next to “Add to the story” on your Profile page
- Choose “Activity log”
- Now you are on the Activity Log tab. Tap the “Manage Activity” button at the end,
- You will get a pop-up on “Manage Activity;” press “Your Posts”
- Now you will be on the “Manage Your Posts” tab. There are three buttons at the very top of that page: Trash, Filter, and Archive.
- The Filter button will let you filter the posts you want to pick (assuming you don’t just want to delete all of them). You may pick Date or People by category (such as images, text messages, and posts, or videos from other apps). You can then click on the individual filtered posts area after you pick your filter. After that just click at the bottom of the very screen on Archive or Trash. You’ll have the opportunity to restore any trashed entries for just 30 days, according to Facebook, after which they’ll be completely deleted.
- Furthermore, there is a checkbox at the very top of the listing; if you tap that area, it will pick all of your posts already in your list and you can delete all of them at once.
- But, here’s the catch: only the posts that are only in the accessible list will be removed by Facebook — and only fill the list of posts if you keep scrolling down. For instance, while I do have a lot of posts on Facebook that have photos in them and when I filtered the list of posts for “Images and Videos,” I was able to pick posts by May 2016 only because that probably was as far as I scrolled in the past. When you have Facebook posts worth several years that you would want to erase, so that’s a lot of scrolling — and waiting. (The app paused on my phone to refill after every 10 Facebook posts.)
- Anyway, once all the posts you would like to remove have been found, tap the “Trash” area (or the “Archive” area if you want to archive them)
- If you have misspelled any words or changed your embarrassed mind, click “Trash” at the very top of the page to view all the posts you’ve inserted in the trash. You will click on the three little dots to the very right of each entry to display, restore, archive, or delete them permanently the entry.
It is quite likely that this option is just the very first iteration of the Manage Activity function, and a more realistic solution will be given by a future update. Manage Activity will be accessible on the ios app right now, according to Facebook, and it will soon pop up on the web edition.
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