A new update introducing a much sought-after Facebook “Remove” feature to its messaging service shows Mark Zuckerberg’s company are still thinking about how to improve its apps’ features frdpiyr their ongoing controversies. The news of this update comes as bad news for Facebook and their PR department seems never-ending with scandal after scandal. Recently, the Silicon Valley giant was accused of referring to kids as ‘whale tickets’. A majority of their energy now seems to go into making their platform safe for users and preventing the spread of false information rather than feature updates.
The Facebook “Remove” feature allows users to unsend messages for up to 10 minutes after it has been sent (via TechCrunch). The feature replaces the ‘Delete’ button with two options: “Remove For Everyone” and “Remove For You”. The former will mean that the message disappears from the conversation for the person(s) who you had sent the message to. While the latter just removes the message from the senders’ view.
However, for users hoping to avoid any potential embarrassments that the sending of messages by mistake can lead to, you may still end up with some questions from the receivers. The message isn’t removed completely but instead replaced with text saying you removed the message. The feature will inevitably lead to awkward conversations in which curious users will demand to know what was so wrong with the message to require its deletion.
There’s an interesting backstory to Facebook’s “Remove” feature. Rumors swirled of its potential introduction in April 2018 when TechCrunch reported that users who had received messages from Mark Zuckerberg had now seen them deleted. The confusion around this incident demonstrated that the removal of messages was possible, leaving users to wonder when the feature will come to them. Users’ wishes have somewhat been fulfilled, although it didn’t seem like the Facebook CEO had a 10-minute time limit placed on the deletion on his messages.
