Dealing with skeletons
lurking in your Facebook closet has never been easier
Facebook is
rolling out a new feature that will be a boon to everyone who’s looking to
scrub their social media presence squeaky-clean. Called ‘Manage Activity’, the
new tool will enable people to easily triage and then hide or delete their old
– and undesirable – posts en masse. The feature greatly simplifies the
currently painstaking process of purging your Facebook
persona of
potentially problematic posts.
The social
network itself outlined a few likely scenarios when the tool might come in
handy:
“Whether
you’re entering the job market after college or moving on from an old
relationship, we know things change in people’s lives, and we want to make it
easy for you to curate your presence on Facebook to more accurately reflect who
you are today. That’s why we’re launching Manage Activity to help you archive
or trash old posts, all in one place,” according to the announcement on Tuesday.
Manage
Activity allows you to archive or delete selected posts. The former involves
hiding any posts from the public eye, but still keeping them for yourself. The
second option lets you move your old comments or photos to a trash can; you
will then have 30 days to reinstate the material, after that it will be gone
for good. You can do the cleanse either individually or in bulk.
The arguably
much-needed tool comes with filtering criteria that will help you sort and find
posts with certain people in them or in a specific time range. You no longer
need to sift laboriously through your Facebook timeline, post by post, rely on
third-party apps, or take the nuclear option of deleting your Facebook account
entirely in the hope of reducing your digital footprint.
The new
feature is available in Facebook’s mobile apps and in Facebook Lite, and will
come to desktop later. You can access by navigating to your profile’s ‘Activity
Log’ section and tapping on ‘Manage Activity’.
To be sure,
the ability to remedy your past social media transgressions shouldn’t detract
from the need to remain wary of what and with whom you
share on Facebook or other social sites now and in the
future. To learn how you can lock down your privacy on the social platform,
head over to our tips for beefing up your Facebook
privacy.