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Zuckerberg can unsend Facebook messages, and soon you can too
- It turns out that there is a Facebook Messenger unsend feature – but only Facebook elite have access to it.
- The information broke when numerous reports surfaced of Mark Zuckerberg messages disappearing, but the rest of the conversations remaining.
- After being caught red-handed, Facebook promised that a public Facebook Messenger unsend feature would come soon, and executives will lose access to it until then.
Remember that time you sent a nasty Facebook message to your ex that you immediately regretted right after you hit the enter key? Yeah, me neither, that never happened to me, ever.
Well, if it hypothetically happened, you wouldn’t be able to unsend that Facebook message. But the world found out yesterday, via TechCrunch, that Mark Zuckerberg had the power to unsend Facebook messages when multiple reports confirmed that messages from Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives mysteriously disappeared from inboxes. However, the messages to those Facebook employees remained.
It turns out that Zuckerberg and co could unsend messages for a long time, possibly for the past four years. But us regular folk do not have the ability.
Now that this secret unsend feature is causing even more PR woes for Facebook to pile on top of all the other woes the company is facing, Facebook leadership confirmed that not only will “regular” users get an unsend feature at some point in the future, but the function will be blocked for all Facebook executives until that time.
Here is the statement from Facebook regarding the unsend feature:
“We have discussed this feature several times. And people using our secret message feature in the encrypted version of Messenger have the ability to set a timer — and have their messages automatically deleted. We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives’ messages. We should have done this sooner — and we’re sorry that we did not.”
This whole situation makes you wonder what other secret features elite Facebook users have that us peasants do not. It also makes you wonder, if journalists hadn’t caught onto this story, would Facebook ever have made this unsend feature public?
If you are already on team “I hate Facebook,” this story is likely to simply reconfirm your stance. However, there are probably a lot of on-the-fence Facebook users out there for whom this will be the last straw, as it is another example of Facebook only fessing up to problems when caught red-handed.
It doesn’t seem like the #deletefacebook trend is going away any time soon.