Facebook got a lot of flak last April when it was found deleting Mark Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes. So in a bid to do damage control, Facebook said that it would soon roll out an “Unsend” feature that would allow other users to retract sent messages from recipients’ inboxes. Well after almost nine months from then, Facebook is finally rolling out this “Unsend” feature to all its Messenger users across the globe.
Facebook started testing this “Unsend” feature in October and rolled it out to users in select countries later in November. But starting today, it’s now available for both Android and iOS users around the world. With this “Unsend” feature, Messenger users can delete a sent message from the receiver’s inbox within 10 minutes. This is helpful if you mistakenly send a wrong message in a wrong chat – be it a private chat or a group chat.
To delete a sent message from receiver’s inbox, you just have to tap on that message, select ‘Remove’, then ‘Remove for Everyone’, and then ‘Remove’ again. Doing this will remove the message from the receiver’s inbox, and Facebook will replace that message with text to alert the recipient of the removal of the message. This is to make sure that this “Unsend” feature isn’t misused.
That said, Facebook also lets users report deleted messages if they are inappropriate.
“The pros are that users want to be in control . . . and if you make a mistake you can correct it. There are a lot of legitimate use cases out there that we wanted to enable,” said Stan Chudnovsky, Facebook’s Head of Messenger. “We need to make sure we don’t open up any new venues for bullying. We need to make sure people aren’t sending you bad messages and then removing them because if you report them and the messages aren’t there we can’t do anything” Chudnovsky further added.
If you are an Android or iOS user and don’t see this new feature yet, make sure you are using the latest version of Facebook Messenger.
Download Links: Facebook Messenger for Android | Facebook Messenger for iOS
