Facebook lets you delete posts and comments, and soon it’ll do the same for sent messages. The social network doesn’t want anyone to be stuck with accidental or straight-up awkward messages that can ruin a conversation. It’ll lead to the release of an unsend feature for Facebook Messenger all users can take advantage of.
Other Facebook-owned services have something similar. WhatsApp gives users an hour to reverse what’s been delivered, and Instagram doesn’t place any restrictions. Facebook Messenger, however, will attach one limitation to the unsend feature.
The catch will be that, although you can delete messages, you’ll need to do so within a 10-minute window. So there’s a time limit that users must adhere to. It also means users can’t go hours, days, weeks, months, and years back to strip conversations of their content.
It was already in testing for at least one user. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who’s been battling privacy concerns throughout the year, instructed his company to delete his own messages as far back as 2014. Upon that getting out, Facebook and Zuckerberg decided to offer the feature to its entire user base.
The Facebook Messenger app for iOS and Android devices should see this feature go live within the next few weeks.
