Facebook 'Manage Activity' Will Let You Delete Your Awkward Posts From School Days

Facebook has introduced a new tab on its mobile apps, called ‘Manage Activity’. As the name suggests, Manage Activity on Facebook will let you ‘manage’ the kind of stuff that you had once posted, and might now find embarrassing, awkward or whatever adjective you may want to attach to such stuff. These may include status updates, photos or any other posts that you may have made, with people you are no longer in touch with, or simply do not wish to see any longer.

To let you do this, Facebook’s Manage Activity tab will have two options – archive and trash. If you choose to archive posts, Facebook will basically turn the privacy setting of those posts into ‘private’, so that only you can see them if you wish to, some time in the future. However, if you do not wish to see certain posts at all, you can choose to trash them. These posts will remain in the trash folder of your Facebook account for a period of 30 days before being deleted permanently, so that you can undo these changes should you wish to.

According to Facebook’s official post, the Manage Activity feature will “let you view and manage your posts in bulk”. It will also have filters, using which you can find the kind of posts that you are looking for. These filters will include sorting posts with a person’s name, and even within specific time ranges. A full range of filters that the feature will come with can be seen in the video here.

Facebook has stated that the feature is first being rolled out on its Android and iOS apps, soon. It will subsequently be introduced on desktop, and then on the Facebook Lite app at a later date. This can be an important tool for Facebook’s legions of users, who may be meaning to ‘clean up’ their profiles for a long time, but the present process of manually finding old posts is a bit too tedious.

As of now, it is not clear as to what the feature’s privacy policy is. While Facebook’s release states that posts added in trash will be deleted from a person’s profile forever, it is not clear if the same would also be deleted from all of Facebook always, or be kept in its records. The ‘Manage Activity’ tab will be rolled out to Facebook’s users in the coming days, so keep an eye out on your Facebook app’s settings.