Facebook has finally made good on its promise to let users unsend chat after TechCrunch discovered Mark Zuckerberg had secretly retracted some of his Facebook Messages from recipients. Today Facebook Messenger globally rolls out “Remove for everyone” to help you pull back typos, poor choices, embarassing thoughts, or any other message.
For up to 10 minutes after sending a Facebook Message, the sender can tap on it and they’ll find the delete button has been replaced by “Remove for you”, but there’s now also a “Remove for everyone” option that pulls the message from recipients’ inboxes. They’ll see an alert that you removed a message in its place, and can still report the message to Facebook. The feature could make people more comfortable having honest conversations or using Messenger for flirting since they can second guess what they send.
Yet Facebook wouldn’t say if it will now resume removing executives’ messages from recipients even long after they’re delivered as it said.
For a quick recap, here’s how Facebook got to Unsend:
-Facebook Messenger never had an Unsend option, except in its encrypted Secret messaging product where you can set an expiration timer on chats, or in Instagram Direct
-In April 2018, TechCrunch reported that some of Mark Zuckerberg’s messages had been removed from the inboxes of recipients, including non-employees. There was no trace of the chats in the message thread, leaving his conversation partners looking like they were talking to themselves, but email receipts proved the messages had been sent but later disappeared.
-Facebook claimed this was partly because it was “limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages” for security purposes in the wake of the Sony Pictures hack, yet it never explained why only some messages to some people had been removed
-The next morning, Facebook changed its tune and announced it’d build an Unsned button for everyone, providing this statement: “We have discussed this feature several times . . . 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.”
-Six months later in October 2018, Facebook still hadn’t launched the feature, but then TechCrunch found Facebook had been prototyping the feature
-In November, Facebook started to roll out the feature with the current “Remove for everyone” design and 10 minute limit
-Now every iOS and Messenger user globally will get the Unsend feature
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2RGR3KX
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