Facebook is all set to introduce a new tool to help users delete old posts and shrink their digital footprint on the social network.
The new feature called “Manage Activity,” will let users prune their posts in bulk, making it less of a headache to delete content aging badly or anything else unnecessary that’s built up from years. The new feature will be available to some users on the Facebook app and will roll out more broadly in the coming days.
In a preview of the tool, it looked like a vastly more useful way to control aging content without having to manually scroll through years of old posts.
Archived posts stick around in a kind of purgatory, remaining viewable to their creator, like the Stories archive feature on Instagram. Deleted posts will hang out for 30 days before being wiped and users can either restore them or manually delete them from there.
In the past, users were stuck either batch-deleting old posts manually or installing third-party browser add-ons, which are notoriously rife with malware.
Old content poses similar problems and can also be a goldmine for anyone looking to compromise an account, whether for harassment purposes, identity theft or whatever else.
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As social networks age, old posts and tagged content builds up, like a kind of digital plaque. For privacy purposes, scraping that stuff off regularly and cleaning things up is a good idea.
