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.
source: Facebook
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.
