As everyone knows, Facebook is always updating its code, sometimes for the worse. However, sometimes they get things right. Most people have done this at some time – sent a message on Facebook’s Messenger app in anger or another emotion and immediately regretted sending it. Maybe someone was telling you about a death in the family and you accidentally selected a great big grin instead of a sad emoji.
Now you can do something about it, but you only have ten minutes to delete the offending message, hopefully before the other party gets a chance to read it. After that, the message is stuck there and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Deleting Facebook messages
The new feature was rolled out for Android and iOS users yesterday. The ability to delete messages before you are embarrassed has been teased by Facebook for some time and users have been requesting it for ages. Now it has been revealed via leaks that the option is available.
As noted by Cosmopolitan, after you send the offending message, all you have to do is press on the message on your phone, which will give you several options, like “forward” or “translate,” but it now also has a “remove” feature.
By choosing that, the message is deleted not only for you but for the person or everyone else involved in the chat. There will, however, be a note revealing that a message has been deleted, so that might get them wondering.
It turns out Facebook's boss Mark Zuckerberg has had the ability to do so for some time. When users pointed this out, saying it was unfair, it was explained that his messages were able to be removed for security reasons, like in what happened in the massive Sony hack. However, after it became clear that Zuckerberg was getting special treatment, Facebook had announced back then that they were planning to add the feature over the coming months. Now it is finally here.
Reporting abusive messages
On the other side of the coin, Facebook has confirmed that should you spot an abusive message before it is deleted, you can still report it. This is in place to avoid users sending people harmful messages and then removing them.
Reportedly, there is a similar tool in other apps, like WhatsApp, however, in that case, you can delete it over an hour after it is sent. Apparently, it was available for a shorter period initially, so maybe Facebook will follow the trend of its own app.
Now users are asking when Twitter will offer a similar solution for direct messaging. You can’t satisfy everyone it seems. Mind you, from his profile it claims Chris Messina invented hashtags, so the guy might have a point. #GoodGuy