- Facebook just introduced a new feature that makes it easier to archive or delete old posts.
- The Manage Activity feature lets Facebook users manage everything they’ve ever posted on Facebook and sort all of their posts to find exactly what they’re looking for.
- Manage Activity will be available on mobile first, and then desktop and Facebook Lite.
Facebook, for all of its innumerable flaws, is a platform billions of people all around the world use to stay in touch with one another and share moments of their lives with friends and family members. But chances are that if you have been using Facebook since you were young (or you’ve just had an account for a while), there are posts you wouldn’t want potential employers to see or you would simply like to have stricken from the record.
Purging a Facebook account that has existed for months or years has never been especially easy, but this Tuesday, Facebook introduced a new tool called Manage Activity that greatly simplifies the process of removing old posts from your profile. Facebook says that whether you’re graduating or going through a breakup, it wants “to make it easy for you to curate your presence on Facebook to more accurately reflect who you are today.”
Manage Activity gives you two options for removing posts from your timeline. If you want to get rid of a post you made on your News Feed or a photo you shared for good, you can send it to the trash. From there, you can either manually delete the post forever, or, after 30 days, the post will be permanently deleted automatically. You can also choose to restore the post from the trash within those 30 days if you change your mind.
If you want to preserve a post, but don’t want the public to see it anymore, you can also archive it. That way, the photo or message won’t vanish altogether, but no one else will be able to see it on your profile.
But the most useful feature of Manage Activity is the ability to manage many old posts at once. As you can see in the video at the bottom of this article, when you access Manage Activity from your Activity Log on Facebook’s mobile app, you will have the option to easily select many posts at once. You can also filter those posts by category, by date, or by the people that were tagged in them. That way, you won’t have to waste time scrolling endlessly through everything you’ve ever posted in order to find and select all of the posts you want to be removed.
According to the post on Facebook’s website, Manage Activity will roll out on mobile first, but will also be available on the desktop website and Facebook Lite in the future. It joins the Clear History tool as yet another way for users to have greater control over their own data on the social network.
