Citizen erased

I can’t delete my Facebook account right now. I need to use the Messenger app for various reasons that I can’t control.

However, partly in response to Mark Zuckerberg’s statments prior to Trump’s inauguration, partly because of the general “AI” nonsense that’s being spouted and partly because of the ever-increasing enshittification of the platform, I decided to delete all my old posts and photos from Facebook.

It wasn’t easy, but I discovered a few things along the way that might make life easier for others who do the same.

First of all, I tried deleting photos. You can delete whole albums easily, but deleting the standard timeline photos is a pain. You have to delete each one individually and there’s a confirmation dialog box that doesn’t respond to keystrokes. So scratch that.

If you delete a post containing photos, Facebook automatically deletes the photos. That’s a plus. However, you can’t simply delete individual posts; you have to move them to the “trash”, which simply delays the problem. You could wait for 30 days for the trash to be emptied automatically, if you believe the promise. Or you can empty the trash, which is a whole new level of pain and buggy software. First of all, the “select all” option only selects what you can see, so if you have more than about 10 items in the trash you have to keep scrolling and selecting. Secondly, when you’ve finally managed to select the entire content of the trash, the delete option requires your password. And there’s another bug in the sequencing here. The first dialog you see asks for your password; the second tells you that it’s going to ask for your password. More shitty software.

But there’s good news too. There’s a way to bulk-delete posts. You can delete up to 50 at a time. To do this, go to your own profile page (or whatever it’s called) by clicking on your image. On this page you should see a section called “Posts” with a button “Manage posts”. Click it.

On the next page, you should see a list of all your posts in reverse chronological order. They appear to be grouped by month and each month has a “Select all” link. In an ideal world you would click “Select all” for every month, then click the “Next” button and delete all the posts.

But no, that would be too easy.

• If you select more than 50 posts you can’t do anything.
• If you select posts in your timeline made by others, you might only be able to hide them.
• If you select posts made by others in which you are tagged, you can only untag yourself.
• If your selection contains a mixture of the above then your options are limited.

The trick is to select all your own posts and delete them. After that. select the posts that you’re tagged in and untag yourself. If there’s anything remaining that you can’t delete or untag, hide them.

And there’s another catch: the deleting activity appears to happen in the background. So if you reload the page, some posts that you have deleted might appear to be still available. Just ignore them for a while; if they don’t automatically vanish after a time, try to delete them again.

I deleted all my old posts and photos by this method and left behind a profile photo and a post explaining what I did and why. So now, while I’m not exactly facebook-free, I don’t have any history there.